The Kids Are All Wired: Decoding the Gen Z Hot Takes
By: Tom Ewing, Head of Communications, System1 Group
If you’re sick of hearing presentations about Millennials at research conferences, I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is, you won’t be seeing quite so many. The bad news is, you’ll be watching ones about Gen Z instead. Two presentations at TMRE on Tuesday shared what their presenters had learned about the newest generation of consumers – and the ways they missed the mark were as informative as the targets they hit.
In the morning, Alisha Snow of Smarty Pants presented on ‘Next Gen Shoppertunities’, looking at the future of shopping, as envisioned by the kids, tweens and teens who make up Gen Z. In the afternoon, Anna Fieler, CMO of online media and lifestyle brand POPSUGAR, shared her thoughts and experiences of ‘The Future Consumer’ – the people who are going to be her core audience five and ten years down the line.
As with any generational cohort, the first problem is working out where they start and end. The most generous estimates have the oldest members of Gen Z hitting their 20s right now, while the youngest are around 7. If you think a 7-year-old and a 20-year-old probably don’t have much in common, of course you’d be quite right. So, presentations about this cohort are still very much in the “discovery phase”, where only the broadest generalisations will work. For instance, it’s safe to say Gen Z will have a very intimate relationship with technology, and that the processes by which they interact with that technology will be ever more seamless. (Pretty much every Google Image Search on “Gen Z” shows young people gazing at screens, so this is not in itself an insight.)
Both Snow and Fieler took the opportunity to unveil a range of possible futures, spinning out from these very wide trends. Snow focused on the opportunities for retail to go “beyond the cart”, Fieler looked at the way brands can connect with Gen Z via content. Both presentations were more memorable when they brought these stories to life via specific, empathic examples. For today’s kids, Snow pointed out, shopping doesn’t mean a cart or a store, it means plain brown boxes arriving any time of day – and the delivery windows for those boxes are getting ever shorter. Fieler, meanwhile, talked about kids’ symbiotic relationship with their devices: her teenage son has “two brains, one in his skull, one in his palm”.
The overall impression was of device-savvy kids who expected shopping to be instant, public, experiential and largely cash-free. Snow was evangelical about the notion – “Imagine if shopping was infinite, if shopping never stopped.” Fieler at least acknowledged the darker side to all this – kids’ attention spans are shrinking dramatically, she claimed, even as their ability to process and juggle information is spiking.
Fieler summed things up with the acronym IPA – not the beer, but a set of three qualities Gen Z value. Immediacy, Personalisation, Authenticity. Here was where my eyebrows started to raise a smidgen. As a cynical X-er, I’m old enough to remember the first wave of presentations on Millennials, and that was all the stuff they apparently wanted too. Come to think of it, we Gen X-ers were meant to be in revolt against corporate shallowness (and here we are presenting at marketing conferences).
Reframe Immediacy, Personalisation and Authenticity as kids wanting stuff that appeals especially to them, quickly, that isn’t blatantly phoney, and you’ve got the mindset identified as far back as Catcher in The Rye. It’s not that these things aren’t true, it’s that they’re always true. They’re a set of needs which iterate in different ways as the material foundation of people’s lives – technology and economic reality – changes. Which is why the most specific data about a generational cohort ends up being the most useful, because they’re grounded in that material change. (Almost anything useful we can say about Millennials, for instance, came once we could get data on reactions to the Great Recession).
If you’re presenting about Gen Z, the onus is on you to prove that these people are meaningfully different from Millennials, and focusing on attitudes, needs and aspirations tends not to get there. These presentations were entertaining and timely reminders of how integrated technology is in young lives, but it may be that it’s simply too early to say anything truly insightful about the youngest generation beyond that.