Zoomers coming of age and becoming important for marketers
When creating a business the market to address is one of many questions that needs to be answered. Clarity in to whom to speak and design are important. And up to this date you probably heard about Boomers, Genaration X, Millenials and Generation Z (also called Zoomers). In this article I would like to reflect a bit on the latter as a new client of mine requested to change the branding to fit to the GenZ population. These are people born between 1997 and 2012.
This genaration is the first one entirely being native to digital. They didn't experience a life before internet and grew up with smart phones, online shopping and apps in daily life. They are growing up facing many social, political and climate challenges. And they are used to social media and self expression on different channels. They have most likely one social media account at the age of twelve, some had it even younger.
Compared to millenials this generation has more seemingly unpolished photos on their accounts, showing people like they really look instead of using photoshop and other image improving apps to pretend a reality that doesn't exist. Think of all these brands like Dove, that made the first advertising attempt to show women of different sizes and colors when only perfect models with a certain body type was the preferred advertising profile. So the social media profiles from perfectly shot instagram accounts that looked like advertising they started showing wrinkles, love handles, double chins, freckles, pimples and flat lit photos instead. To describe this I would say the posts feature the theme perfectly imperfect.
Concerning the various challenges this generation is growing up with they are usually taking a stand for one or several political, environmental or social matters. And they are ready to support them in one way or the other. To be considered here is that this generation is fully digital, that means the content needs to be easy to digest, graphically appealing, showing facts and data in an easy to understand way. They are digital natives and any interaction should be digitally easy. Consider this question: Is this digital available, do we offer something like a one-click buying experience? The Zoomers are now entering the workforce and are switching to an income target group for businesses. They are mainly on mobile surfaces and are online several hours each day. If you want to descibe GenZ's you could say that they are facing an internal between self-consciousness and self-promotion.
If you like to learn more about the latest trend to target Zoomers you might want to take a look at the next step of evolution in consumer capitalism. They named it a new way of branding: adorkable, a combination of adorable and dorky. I found this article that describes it pretty well with a lot of examples.
The adorkable trend for me was most visible with Chiara Ferragni, who wears a lot of identifyers like smileys, rainbow colored pearl bands, neon color clothings, which seems to be more for teenagers than for adults - whereas thinking about it closely, it assembles pretty much the adorkable trend targeting Zoomers. Documenting daily life and making product placements just appearing accidentally without making them a focus in the posts.
Image source: from @chiaraferragni
For brands my personal recommendation is to create visuals (think like filters, badges, artworks, stickers, branded material) that enables the creative Zoomer self-expression through these tools. It should be trendy in one of the 80s aesthetics, word clipart visuals, backgrounds, that looks like self-made designs in word with at least 3 non-matching fonts and color transitions and fades. There will be a huge potential for NGO's for example to offer easy donations directly with one click on the social media channels without ever having to switch to another app to complete the transaction.
And here comes the daily dose of self-marketing: I can help you setting up your marketing and advertising strategy and create an action plan on how to move your company forward and generate leads for your business. Contact me here.
Kommentare