With Gen Z being on the minds of all marketers today and MediaCat Magazine exploring how organisations are doing things differently, we reached out to Jay Richards (Co-Founder and CEO of the Gen Z market research platform Imagen Insights) to find out how brands can better attract them. Speaking to MediaCat’s Content & Social Media Editor, Svilena Keane, Jay revealed the most common misconceptions about Gen Z, his predictions about Gen Alpha, and why brands shouldn’t take themselves too seriously.
Hi, Jay. Could you introduce yourself and Imagen Insights?
Hi, my name is Jay. I’m CEO at Imagen Insights, and we help our clients like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Niketo crowdsource quality from Gen Z within minutes. We have 37,000 Gen Z in 111 countries around the world.
A lot of brands want to engage with Gen Z, but they don’t understand them or what they want. What are some common misconceptions about Gen Z?
Jay Richards
I think the first most common misconception is that they’re not buying products or services. I think the main reason for that is a lot of people assume that they’re younger than they are. Gen Z are aged between 13 and 28, so they are well and truly in the workplace, purchasing products and services. Because of the misconception of age, people think they don’t need to target this demographic yet. But the main thing to understand about them is that by 2030, their spending power will have increased to 33 trillion. So, the amount of money they’re going to be spending by 2030 is massive.
Another misconception is that they like polished social media. The reason why people think this is because that’s what Millennials like. Millennials probably post a couple of times a year and when we’re posting is when we’re on holiday but Gen Z are not like that. They’re going to be posting content on a regular basis. They’re posting whatever is in front of them. They’re not really bothered about how it looks. They’re just posting about their general lives, and they’re not fussed about how it comes across.
A prime example of this is on TikTok; if you look at a millennial on TikTok, they’ll normally try and introduce what they are going to talk about at the start of the video. With Gen Z, they just jump straight into it. It’s almost like you’ve caught them mid-thought and they start talking straight away.
Gen Z’s constant consumption of content makes it very challenging for brands to catch their attention. How can brands cut through the noise to attract them?
The main thing is to not take themselves too seriously. I think the brands that have done it really well — Duolingo, Ryanair, Paddy Power — are just not taking themselves seriously. For example, you see the TikTok videos where at the start, somebody slips over on the floor or gets hit by a car or something, and then they go into a brand talking about their deals. It’s funny because they don’t take themselves too seriously. They’re only selling cars. They’re not conducting surgery. It’s not the end of the world.
I think not taking yourself seriously and just putting content there and seeing what works and just seeing what lands with people is great. Also, senior leadership being part of the content creation process works really well. For example, the team had me do a TikTok where I was acting like I was coming in late to meetings and did not really care about it. Obviously, if you Google me, you’ll know I’m the CEO, but in that skit, I was acting like I didn’t give a damn. Those videos are our most viewed pieces of content that we’ve ever done. And it’s just me not taking myself seriously.
The last thing would be the idea of actually understanding who that consumer is. So a lot of times brands are just like going off the general human beings. But the truth of the matter is that there’s going to be a specific type of person buying your products and your services.
You need to research to understand who they are and the type of content they’ve been interested in. If you do these two things, you can end up with something that wins.
Do you think that this type of content can convert to sales?
I would definitely say so because the truth of the matter is these people are going to be purchasing products anyway. So with regards to Duolingo, if I’m going to be using an app to learn to speak another language, the app that’s making me laugh and is constantly in my face, that’s the app I’m going to choose. It may not convert somebody who wasn’t considering it in the first place — it may do — but if I’m going to be taking a flight somewhere and I had a choice between Ryanair and another airline, Ryanair is always in my face, so I’m probably going to choose them.
Do you have any predictions about Generation Alpha?
You’re seeing this with Gen Z already, but you’re going to see it more with Gen Alpha, where they’re going to be off technology completely. I think the reason for this is because they’re starting so young. This technological lethargy is coming and you’re going to see a lot of them pushing back to having phones that don’t have the internet and being more methodical about what they’re choosing to spend their time on.
You see this often in restaurants with parents or whoever it may be, saying ‘Here’s a tablet, just keep quiet’. And I understand it because parenting in this generation is tough, but I think it will wear a lot of people down.
If you look at Gen Z, they are very careful about the amount of data they’re giving to social media platforms, unlike millennials — we just gave them all of our data because we didn’t understand. With Generation Alpha, I think they’re going to look at Gen Z and think ‘I can see what it looks like to be addicted to socials. Let me curtail that and do it less’.
I think you’re going to see them giving less data, but also pulling away from social media more, which is going to be an interesting challenge for brands. The good thing is that it will mean brands will have to understand the consumer better and take more time to actually engage with them.
If you could leave our readers with one final piece of advice for engaging Gen Z, what would that be?
Understanding that they’re not a monolith. So understanding that we can make generalisations across the generation, because it’s easy for marketers and brands to package them up. But realistically, each consumer and the customer is going to be different. You need to really do the research so you can understand who is purchasing your products at the moment, but also who desires to purchase your products in the future. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, we looked at a report and it says that 70% of Gen Z do this so we’re just going to do that’. It doesn’t really make any sense.
What we need to do is sit down with customers and engage in a conversation with them and ask ‘How can we engage with you as a brand?’ or ‘What do you want to see from us as a brand?’. And this isn’t a one-off process. You have to keep doing this because now that Labour is in, what Gen Z want will be different. When the American election comes along, what Gen Z in the US want will be different.
You have to constantly engage with your customers because things are constantly changing. When you’re staying in constant communication with consumers, you can then feel those changes and adapt your processes and what you’re doing to line up.
Svilena Keane, Content & Social Editor at MediaCat Magazine
Svilena is the Content & Social Media Editor at MediaCat Magazine. She has a joint bachelor’s degree from Royal Holloway University, where she studied Comparative Literature and Art History. During her time at Royal Holloway, she was also the Editor-in-Chief of the student newspaper The Founder. Since then, she has worked at a number of digital and print publications in Bulgaria and the UK, covering a wide range of topics including arts, culture, business and politics. She is also the founder of the online blog Sip of Culture and a self-published poet.
Co-founder, Jay Richards, is the 5th of 6 children from migrant parents. From a rebellious start while at school to now the Founder of Imagen Insights, a Forbes 30under30 entrepreneur and Mediatel's Future Leader finalist of 2020, he credits his Business Studies teacher at school for guiding his sense of entrepreneurship in the right direction at the right time and now aims to provide opportunities to Gen Z.
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With Gen Z being on the minds of all marketers today and MediaCat Magazine exploring how organisations are doing things differently, we reached out to Jay Richards (Co-Founder and CEO of the Gen Z market research platform Imagen Insights) to find out how brands can better attract them. Speaking to MediaCat’s Content & Social Media Editor, Svilena Keane, Jay revealed the most common misconceptions about Gen Z, his predictions about Gen Alpha, and why brands shouldn’t take themselves too seriously.
Hi, Jay. Could you introduce yourself and Imagen Insights?
Hi, my name is Jay. I’m CEO at Imagen Insights, and we help our clients like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Nike to crowdsource quality from Gen Z within minutes. We have 37,000 Gen Z in 111 countries around the world.
A lot of brands want to engage with Gen Z, but they don’t understand them or what they want. What are some common misconceptions about Gen Z?
I think the first most common misconception is that they’re not buying products or services. I think the main reason for that is a lot of people assume that they’re younger than they are. Gen Z are aged between 13 and 28, so they are well and truly in the workplace, purchasing products and services. Because of the misconception of age, people think they don’t need to target this demographic yet. But the main thing to understand about them is that by 2030, their spending power will have increased to 33 trillion. So, the amount of money they’re going to be spending by 2030 is massive.
Another misconception is that they like polished social media. The reason why people think this is because that’s what Millennials like. Millennials probably post a couple of times a year and when we’re posting is when we’re on holiday but Gen Z are not like that. They’re going to be posting content on a regular basis. They’re posting whatever is in front of them. They’re not really bothered about how it looks. They’re just posting about their general lives, and they’re not fussed about how it comes across.
A prime example of this is on TikTok; if you look at a millennial on TikTok, they’ll normally try and introduce what they are going to talk about at the start of the video. With Gen Z, they just jump straight into it. It’s almost like you’ve caught them mid-thought and they start talking straight away.
Gen Z’s constant consumption of content makes it very challenging for brands to catch their attention. How can brands cut through the noise to attract them?
The main thing is to not take themselves too seriously. I think the brands that have done it really well — Duolingo, Ryanair, Paddy Power — are just not taking themselves seriously. For example, you see the TikTok videos where at the start, somebody slips over on the floor or gets hit by a car or something, and then they go into a brand talking about their deals. It’s funny because they don’t take themselves too seriously. They’re only selling cars. They’re not conducting surgery. It’s not the end of the world.
I think not taking yourself seriously and just putting content there and seeing what works and just seeing what lands with people is great. Also, senior leadership being part of the content creation process works really well. For example, the team had me do a TikTok where I was acting like I was coming in late to meetings and did not really care about it. Obviously, if you Google me, you’ll know I’m the CEO, but in that skit, I was acting like I didn’t give a damn. Those videos are our most viewed pieces of content that we’ve ever done. And it’s just me not taking myself seriously.
The last thing would be the idea of actually understanding who that consumer is. So a lot of times brands are just like going off the general human beings. But the truth of the matter is that there’s going to be a specific type of person buying your products and your services.
You need to research to understand who they are and the type of content they’ve been interested in. If you do these two things, you can end up with something that wins.
Do you think that this type of content can convert to sales?
I would definitely say so because the truth of the matter is these people are going to be purchasing products anyway. So with regards to Duolingo, if I’m going to be using an app to learn to speak another language, the app that’s making me laugh and is constantly in my face, that’s the app I’m going to choose. It may not convert somebody who wasn’t considering it in the first place — it may do — but if I’m going to be taking a flight somewhere and I had a choice between Ryanair and another airline, Ryanair is always in my face, so I’m probably going to choose them.
Do you have any predictions about Generation Alpha?
You’re seeing this with Gen Z already, but you’re going to see it more with Gen Alpha, where they’re going to be off technology completely. I think the reason for this is because they’re starting so young. This technological lethargy is coming and you’re going to see a lot of them pushing back to having phones that don’t have the internet and being more methodical about what they’re choosing to spend their time on.
You see this often in restaurants with parents or whoever it may be, saying ‘Here’s a tablet, just keep quiet’. And I understand it because parenting in this generation is tough, but I think it will wear a lot of people down.
If you look at Gen Z, they are very careful about the amount of data they’re giving to social media platforms, unlike millennials — we just gave them all of our data because we didn’t understand. With Generation Alpha, I think they’re going to look at Gen Z and think ‘I can see what it looks like to be addicted to socials. Let me curtail that and do it less’.
I think you’re going to see them giving less data, but also pulling away from social media more, which is going to be an interesting challenge for brands. The good thing is that it will mean brands will have to understand the consumer better and take more time to actually engage with them.
If you could leave our readers with one final piece of advice for engaging Gen Z, what would that be?
Understanding that they’re not a monolith. So understanding that we can make generalisations across the generation, because it’s easy for marketers and brands to package them up. But realistically, each consumer and the customer is going to be different. You need to really do the research so you can understand who is purchasing your products at the moment, but also who desires to purchase your products in the future. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, we looked at a report and it says that 70% of Gen Z do this so we’re just going to do that’. It doesn’t really make any sense.
What we need to do is sit down with customers and engage in a conversation with them and ask ‘How can we engage with you as a brand?’ or ‘What do you want to see from us as a brand?’. And this isn’t a one-off process. You have to keep doing this because now that Labour is in, what Gen Z want will be different. When the American election comes along, what Gen Z in the US want will be different.
You have to constantly engage with your customers because things are constantly changing. When you’re staying in constant communication with consumers, you can then feel those changes and adapt your processes and what you’re doing to line up.
Featured image: Ron Lach / Pexels