Gen Z: the conservative, ‘ethical’ generation
The global financial crisis has led Generation Z to take a more conservative attitude towards life and brands, marketers suggested at Mumbrella 360 yesterday.
Teenagers born between 1992 and 2005 are also the ‘ethical generation’, and expect brands to take behave accordingly, a session curated by Launch Group proposed.
Virgin Mobile’s marketing director David Scribner said: “Some [Gen Zers] have been in households where their dad’s come home on ‘extended leave’,” he said. “They may even have moved from a private school because their [parents] didn’t have the money for the fees. That’s very impactful in terms their drive to security.”
As a result of the economic climate, this generation’s horizons have lowered in some respects such as travel, noted Jeff Brookes, MD at Sulake Australia, parent company of social gaming firm Habbo Hotel. “Gen Z know how hard it is to save up for a house. They [know they] will need to get into the workforce early to save up for a house, and there’s just no time to start spending a couple of years frittering overseas.”
Rupert Noffs, co-founder and creative director of Gideon Shoes, said that ethics, sustainability and pragmatism were important for Gen Z. “Everyone’s sick of these big companies polluting and mass producing,” he said.
Brookes added: “They’re growing up in a more austere environment and also I think this is the first group to fully realise that it’s up to them to save the world, because the world is in such a bad place at the moment. They keep on seeing other generations ruin things and fob things off and they know they’re going to have to do something or it’s not going to get better.”
When marketing to Gen Z, Brookes said that “authenticity” was key. “It’s not a quick make-over that brand or company can do – you can’t just do a new TVC or ad campaign and have Gen Z think differently of you.”
“You have to live and breathe the values of Gen Z and have that all reflected in your marketing mix, your corporate philosophy and your communications mix and that’s something that’s going to take a long while to do, so you need to start thinking about this generation now.”
The discussion followed research on Gen Z launched at Mumbrella360 by Habbo Hotel. The key findings were:
- Don’t diss traditional media – More than 41% prefer TV as their main source of news. 22% said that they prefer to get their news from online newspapers or magazines, compared to 16% in 2009. 55% say print newspapers will still exist in the next 5 years.
- Tuning out? No chance. Being in touch with news and current affairs is important to Generation Z with 60% reading the news to stay up to date.
- Multi platform – Gen Z love to multi-task. When asked whether they would prefer to watch TV or surf the net, 10% said they surf the net on TV or watch TV on the internet. This is up from 4% in 2009.
- Half say online is their favourite type of media compared to just 37% in 2009. Top pastimes were playing games (31%), chatting (27%) social networking (22%).
- Make me laugh – Comedy is important to Gen Z as well over a third (37%) identified comedies and sitcoms as the most popular programs to watch on television. Humour driven advertising has although fallen with over a third (37%) claiming to like advertising which makes them laugh, compared to 46% in 2009.
- Mobile technology and internet access a necessity – 84% of teens say they’ve accessed the internet via their mobiles; 25% say they do all the time and over a third (35%) claim to do so occasionally.
- Phone apps – The most popular internet application on the phone is social networking – with 61% of Generation Z using the internet on their phones for social networking.
- Advertising savvy – Nearly half (49%) say they like advertising when its relevant, not excessive and entertaining) and 15% said they love advertising. 49% also said they believe it’s successful at getting them to buy products. 26% said they don’t like advertising but understand its role. 10% said they hate advertising.
Right so this is the generation aged between 6 and 19 years old (1992-2005) and we’re calling them ethical and conservative, having restricted travel options and getting into the workforce quickly?
Give me a break. These guys are only in the first wave of leaving school which means… they have no money to travel yet and parents are making them buy their own stuff for the first time (i.e. “oh crap, everything is really expensive and my new unqualified job pays nix)! Their parents are probably still supporting them in terms of food and accommodation and funnily enough… the previous generations also went through economic issues such as inability to afford housing, inability to go travelling until they were older. Most Gen Y went through parents having lack of job security. Gen x experienced recession as did the Boomers.
We need to stop generalising about each generation (with exception being technology abilities – I would have expected most Gen Z to be very savvy in this area). If we’re going to make these grand statements, we should at least wait until the last of the generation has left school and has been in the workforce for a few years.
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Generation profiling always strikes me as a really poor, one-dimensional segmentation model. By either stating the bleeding obvious (as per Sarah’s comments) and with as many exceptions as the rule, these over-generalised observations are just not helpful in any context i can think of.
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Sara, the research referenced was conducted 13 – 18 year olds, who have a surprisingly high spending power as well as a high influence on purchasing. It was based on surveys of many thousands of teenagers across a three year period.
The debate was also framed along the lines of emerging traits – with an open view as to what the commonalities might be and as to whether these are likely to be impacted by external events such as the GFC. i don’t think anyone is saying that all members of any age group behave in an identical way – but it’s generally accepted there will be some common characteristics and that’s useful for employers and marketers.
The purpose of the panel discussion was to see whether the research claims were borne out in real world experiences – using experts who have worked with at least two generations of youth from their teenage years.
With Gen Y, which is now largely accepted as having common characteristics across the group, some of the traits were first spotted just prior to them entering the workforce.
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Conservative? Absolutely. Ethical? Really? You think so? There are certainly ethical folks of that gen around, but can we say broadly that they’re an ethical generation? That does not synch with my experiences of gen Y. Let’s not kid ourselves that anything has changed.
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I’m with Brendan. It’s nice as a snapshot, but largely useless for actionable strategy.
Planning using solely demographics is like only making average-size clothes.
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Oops.
That anon post about average-size clothesshould attribute to myself.
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It’s fairly well known (or maybe it seems it isn’t) that young kids tend to mimic their parents on social and political issues until around the age of 18 – then they move out of home or start partying, screwing, studying etc and develop into the little lefties we know and love.
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interesting points here, i think it comes down to these gen z’ers or millenials growing up in the ‘age of reality’ where its all about transparency and everything for them is a google away. Whereas Gen X’ers and to a degree a big part of the gen y cohort have grown up in the ‘age of image’, whereby brands shapeshifted their identity based on image. I think we’ll see less and less of this as gen z’ers define brands by what they DO not so much what they SAY
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How short is a generation these days? Their definition of Gen Z means Gen Y is just 12 years long (1980-1992).
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recent “generations” have been about 11 – 13 years in duration – Gen X, Y and Z
There’s some debate as to whether technology will accelerate that.
Babyboomers were longer and Gen Jones before that.
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Effective marketing is all about looking to make a meaningful connection with a consumer group. Making these connections requires us to identify some common ground across the group. This is all the Gen Z research has done. By using ongoing real world survey data from over 2000 Australian teens aged 13-17 we have simply identified some common traits and themes among this previously under researched new generation of consumers. The finding that we have published have resonated strongly with a large contingent of both advertising and marketing professionals who understand this consumer group as well as being reflective of broader trends we are seeing in society today. Habbo Australia has around 200,000 Australian teenagers visiting us every month and are spending over 47 minutes there each session and the insights we received from this research was also aligned with our day to day experiences of interacting with teens.
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As a member of Gen Y – its just nice to know we have all gotten over studying gen y as the ‘selfish’ generation or the ‘stay at home’ generation. or the ‘expect the world’ generation or whatever other nonsense.
Gen Z ey? i thought they were calling Gen I coz of Apple taking over the world? what happens in ten years time? Gen A kicks in?
As study goes grouping people by age is pointless – marketing should focus on habit, location and socio economic status.
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Correct me if I am wrong… they like TV, watching comedies and sit coms. They like social networking and being on line. They love their phones – and apps. They like advertising – when it is relevant …
Give me a break – the only benefit of listing these likes and dislikes – and putting percentages next to them, is to highlight significant differences from the population as a whole. From the article above they seem very similar in behaviour to the australian population at large!
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