Winning over Gen Zers

To reach Gen Zers, brands need to master distinct and sometimes overlapping qualities. Brands need to be both agile and stable, regionally aware and locally focused, environmentally sound and acutely price conscious, social-media savvy and respectful of privacy, and authentic and able to tell a compelling story. So yes, reaching Gen Zers is complicated, but as Generation Z’s affluence and influence rise, it’s well worth the effort.

Gen Zers Value Authenticity, Creativity, and Social Impact. 

To approach them effectively, marketers need to understand their preferences, behaviors and motivations. 

• Gen Zers care about the social and environmental impact of their purchases and want to support brands that align with their values. Be transparent and honest about your brand values and purpose. 
• Gen Zers consume a lot of content on social media platforms and expect brands to be creative and entertaining. 
• Gen Zers trust recommendations from people they admire and relate to. 
• Gen Zers like to share their opinions and experiences with their peers and want to feel involved in the brand community. 
• Gen Zers are constantly looking for new and exciting products and services that cater to their needs and interests. Be flexible and innovative in your marketing strategy and offer personalized solutions.

Five Principles that Brands Should Keep in Mind as Approaching Gen Zers. 

Relevance and speed are more important than ever. Gen Zers want brands to be personalized, and customized and help them be distinctive. Therefore, brands can’t rest on history. To stay relevant in the market, brands need to leverage their legacy while investing in fast and continuous innovation perhaps through partnerships and collaborations running at the same speed as smaller and newer brands. A significant share of Gen Zers may associate the brand with quality (for premium shopaholics) or simply see it as an easy choice (for disengaged conformists). McKinsey reported Gen Zers are 20 percent more likely to try out new brands and products than millennials are, and they won’t be loyal to brands that don’t deliver. 

The quality and price equation has to be just right. Gen Zers' high digital literacy and easy access to information enable its members to pick and choose to ensure that they are spending their money on what they really want. In a world in which most consumers research significantly before they buy, being competitive in both quality and price is a prerequisite to winning the allegiance of Gen Zers. 

Brands need to understand which features consumers are willing to pay for. The markers of quality will be different in each segment because the segment members’ values vary. For example, premium shopaholics are willing to pay more to get more; disengaged consumers aren’t. To match quality expectations while keeping prices competitive, brands will have to be more stringent than ever in deciding which features to keep and which to deemphasize.

Social media marketing needs to pay more attention to the video. The role of video can’t be underestimated: Gen Zers view significantly more video media on platforms such as YouTube or TikTok than other cohorts do. That influences how they choose brands and products. Brands that speak to Gen Zers through informative, fun, and inspiring videos, therefore, stand a better chance of being shared and thus cut through the noise. Many brands have grasped that idea already, but there are far more misses than hits. Brands need to build their social-media marketing capabilities, whether real-time or curated, to engage with consumers differently. The brands that are winning are more creative, more authentic, and faster to market with their content. Producing the right video requires different skills than posting the right photo or the right tweet. Marketing teams need to have immediate access to production teams that can create a narrative and can shoot movies that move people and compel them to watch all the way through rather than clicking the skip button. 

Being green isn’t enough: Price and quality also matter. To capture a bigger share of the Generation Z wallet, sustainable products need to speak to quality as well as environmental values and communicate these attributes through a visually compelling story. Many small and successful ethical brands stand out by emphasizing their quality and story through package design and by posting videos and articles about how they came to develop their products. Bigger brands that want to expand their sustainable portfolios should do the same while ensuring that they can back up those assertions. 

Brands need to be locally relevant. The game for brands should be local. Consumers in the region are naturally influenced by their distinct cultural attributes, lifestyles, religions, and eating habits. Brands need to ensure that their value proposition and messaging are tailored to the local context and to the local distribution of consumer segments.

(Source: McKinsey & Company, What makes Asia–Pacific’s Generation Z different?)

Edwin Jonathans - Brand Power Plus