Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2011, is now coming of age in large numbers, and marketers can’t afford to take as long to come to grips with Gen Z as they did with Millennials.
The first cohorts of this new generation, who are now 16 to 19 years old, are increasingly relevant to a wide variety of categories and products. Globally, they are huge too: around 2 billion of the world’s citizens—approximately 27% of the global population—belong to Gen Z.
The danger for marketers is that Gen Z is not “millennial-lite” or “millennial-extra-strong”, but different in distinct ways. Gen Z not only challenges how brands communicate, they challenge the very notion of a brand’s authenticity and transparency in digital.