What Side Parts and Skinny Jeans Can Teach Us About Marketing
You can keep your side part but not your marketing strategies.
If you haven’t caught onto the latest social media buzz about Gen Z telling millennials to stop wearing skinny jeans and to start rocking a middle part, I’m going to guess you’re a Gen X-er or you don’t frequent your social media pages, because for a while, it felt as though all I saw while scrolling through my feed were reels of 30-something-year-old influencers vowing to never give up their side parts. And hey, I’m with them!
But as a business owner, I know that there is so much more I can learn from this up and coming generation of consumers beyond the cut of their jeans and where they part their hair.
Why middle parts matter.
Understanding the differences in generations- what they like, what they don’t like; what they wear, what they don’t wear (ahem- skinny jeans); what they spend their money on and where they save... this fascinates me.
Data is repeatedly showing that Gen Z, this generation behind millennials who the oldest of which are starting to graduate college and enter the workforce, is the most unique and difficult to understand when it comes to marketing.
You might be thinking, why does this matter? I’m not trying to target 18 year olds...
It matters because with each passing year, these little middle-parts are getting older and soon enough they’re going to land smack dab in the middle of your target audience. We are also seeing that they hold a lot of influence with their Millenial friends and followers who long to stay “relevant”.
So, unless your Taylor Swift and can somehow carry your fans with you from small-town high-school breakups to models and pent houses... you need to understand how to market to this younger generation because other companies are going to be researching the heck out of Gen Z and altering their marketing campaigns to speak to them.
If you fail to do so, Gen Z and everyone within their sphere of influence, will be turning their nose up to you like they did to all of us who part our hair to the side.
Here are three takeaways I’ve gathered from studying Gen Z.
Experience over everything
Here’s what we know about Gen Z. We know that their loyalty to brands is nearly nonexistent. Growing up with perfectly curated social media profiles, the iGeneration cares way more about building their own personal brand than having some strong association to a company’s brand.
It doesn’t mean they don’t like brands, but the brands that they seem to be drawn to are brands that promote customer experience, adventure, values, and so forth, not a brand promoting itself and it’s benefits.
The brand Yeti and Lululemon are excellent examples of basing their marketing messages off of the experience of owning their products rather than why their product is the best.
2. Create a place to belong.
Gen Z (and millenials too) long to belong to something bigger than themselves. Social gatherings have been replaced by social media leaving this void of community in their lives.
The result: a deep desire to belong.
Focus on building a community around your brand. Make your customers feel like they’re a part of something when they work with you or buy from you. The most automated company doesn’t win… the most “human” company does.
3. Be prepared to change.
Brands better learn to adapt to the desires of this next group of consumers or they’ll end up in the same category as side parts and skinny jeans. Millennials are beginning to tune out commercials by looking at their phones and ignoring sponsored ads that they’ve seen too many times but Gen Z has completely canceled traditional advertising.
They pay for premium services to remove ads. They use ad-blockers on their phones and laptops. They subscribe to ad-free streaming services to watch TV and they sure as heck aren’t falling prey to our traditional method of sponsored advertisements on social media or Google anymore.
What once worked won’t work anymore.
It’s time for marketers to wake up and listen to these youngsters. You can keep your side part but don’t hold too tightly to what once worked for you when it comes to marketing your business. Times are changing and the landscape of advertising looks drastically different from what it once did.
This blog post was a condensed transcription from the latest episode of The BrandWell Podcast. For a full run-down on how marketing is changing, tune into “What Side Parts and Skinny Jeans can Teach Us About Marketing”
KEEP BRANDING WELL,
Victoria
