Our industry loves to talk universal truths about Gen Zs.

Gen Zs are responsible. 

Gen Zs are environmental warriors. 

Gen Zs aren’t patriotic. 

Gen Zs don’t care about money. 

Gen Zs hate ads. 

Many of these “truths” are one-dimensional or totally contradictory. This isn’t shocking. The term “Gen Z” captures 19% of the UK population. Harry Guild’s Puncturing The Paradox aptly points out how the “Gen Z” label can’t tell us much about a person if it includes both Lil Pump & Prince George. Of course, “truths” about whole generations of any kind are somewhat hollow for this reason. 

But for us people born in the early noughties and late nineties, there’s been one huge change in how we spend our time, the scale of which is so big I’m willing to consider it has had the capacity to dent the culture of a whole generation.

Like how the war made the silent generation frugal. Or how the industrial revolution introduced ‘leisure time’ as we know it to the Victorians. Or how agriculture gave humans ‘society’. 

We’re the first generation of ‘social media natives’ - we grew up half in the real world, half in the artificial, kinda-world of social media. 

Social media permeates digital natives' lives so thoroughly, it's denting our culture.

Why is this significant? Spending a big chunk of your waking hours (for young people in the UK, ¼ on average) engaging with a parallel reality is bound to shake things up a bit. Especially if you’re immersed in it before developing the cognitive ability to understand the difference, and when you’re culturally malleable. As Margaret Atwood says, “you’re cast in bronze by the time you’re 12” - it’s hard to unlearn the culture you pick up in childhood. 

Social media is a one-dimensional world, made up of a sequence of snapshots that deny grey space and backstory. Highs and lows are heightened. Relationships become fairytales, quibbles become wars. We’re socially competitive, so we tend to broadcast particularly significant or interesting things that have happened to us. We Instagram our pigouts and our juice cleanses, but not our sandwiches. We SnapStory our messy nights and our bed burrito days, but not our commutes.

We create, absorb, and reflect the heightened version of reality on social media, and so develop an evolving culture of extremes.

Digital tourists, born before the late nineties and raised solely in the real world, see this heightened digital life as separate from reality - as something you go into and come out of. 

But for us natives, those lines are blurred, and our reality is blended. We’re growing up absorbing those extreme images broadcast by social media, accepting them as true. And, naturally, those extreme images are what we’ve begun to reflect in our own, offline, “real” lives. The time old process of cultural transmission has a glitch; we’re stuck in a strange sort of feedback loop, hatching a new culture of extremes.

What do I mean by a culture of extremes? Well, let’s look at our “all or nothing” behaviour. We’re either running up 8 hour screen times, or we’re digitally detoxing. We’re binging TV shows, or we’re shunning TV entirely for a TikTok week. We stan people and then we cancel them. We have a binge-purge attitude to health that shocks older generations, running on a cycle of high indulgence versus “temple” or detox food, as the norm.

This culture of extremes is alive in how we think about our values and our identities, as well as in our behaviour. 

Of course people, especially young people, from every generation display extreme behaviour. Because we’re testing the limits, and learning moderation. But for us, this culture of extremes only begins with our behaviour. It seeps into how we identify ourselves. 

Exposed to so many different worldviews, we feel comfortable picking up a rostra of different values and ideas, trying them on, and discarding them. We don’t feel the need to commit to a singular sense of ‘self’, instead opting for a kaleidoscope of different ‘me’s.

We’re driving gender fluidity (a gender expression or identity that changes over time), and the rejection of labels. We’re promiscuous with our values - we’re more likely than other groups to say we care about the environment, but no more likely to act on it. One of the most popular sounds on TikTok this year has been this one, documenting Gen Zs refusing to drink anything but plant milk, but tucking into Deliveroo’d steaks for dinner. 

Even our digital selves are happily fragmented - we have “Safe For Work” Instas, and outrageous Finstas for those we trust. Both displaying a heightened version of us - one particularly ‘good’, one particularly ‘bad’.

This is sometimes perceived as fickleness, or hypocrisy. I prefer to see it as a cultural shift towards allowing different, sometimes contradictory ideas or opinions to exist at once. A weird, 21st century “double-think”, that has grown out of constant exposure to the clashing and extreme shades of “truth” on social media. 

The pandemic can only have intensified this culture of extremes. Youth culture has been living on TikTok, because it has nowhere else to hang out. Meaning we haven’t needed to stress test our identities in the real world. In school, you can’t be Regina George and a sk8er boy at the same time. On TikTok, you can engage with and feel a part of various incompatible communities at once, with no-one to call you a phoney.

What does all this mean? 

First, embrace inconsistency.

If you want to understand us natives, it’s crucial that you don’t judge us with the same one-dimensional mirror as one might other generations. We’re different and our contradictions lie on a personal as well as demographic level. Think versions as well as segments. 

We require extra interrogation. When you read that X amount of Gen Zs in the UK drink plant milk, don’t be satisfied you’ve proven they’re environmental warriors. We drove the baked Feta challenge on TikTok. And the epic charcuterie board trend. Not to mention the fast fashion #Haul trend. We fund BooHoo.

You need to embody our “double-think” mindset as you read and think about us; allowing us to take different, contradictory forms. And accept that inconsistent or extreme feeling findingings mean you’re getting closer to a true reading of who we really are.  

People born between 1997 and 2012  account for over 40 percent of global consumers. And their spending power is growing up with them. If brands want to win over digital natives, they need to learn how to speak their language. 

“If you’re in the middle of the road, you’re going to get run over”

- Sir Nigel Bogle

Second, get out of the middle ground, at all costs. 

In agencies we’re incredibly conscious of oversimplifying; we’re not satisfied with the idea of our consumer as a ‘couch potato’ or  a ‘health guru’. Real people are much more complex than this, we say. We must find the true crux of who someone is. 

Of course. But in the case of Gen Zs, that’s not necessarily the same person brands should be speaking to. Extremes like ‘couch potato’ or ‘health guru’ may actually be closer to how us digital natives view ourselves in each different fleeting moment of our day. We shift between extreme, contradictory identities and values, so brands should shift too and speak to us on our terms in order to win our attention. 

Finally, be braver.

These constellations of identities should give brands a license to be bolder; to kill the blanket ideas thrown around about Gen Zs. Brands don’t need to be so afraid of alienating an audience who are happy to pick up different ideals at different times. Marketing history tells us it’s near impossible to alienate anyone anyway. Giz and Greens Pizza make a fortune selling utterly naughty, greasy, gorgeously grotesque cheesy pizza to a market of tattooed, plant-milk drinking, East London flexitarians. But any market report would have told them to steer well clear. A shop called “Pretty Little Thing” makes its money on Gen Z British women, the majority of whom identify as feminist. Crocs owned uncool to become the coolest shoe of 2020. 

Mediocrity is the real enemy.

The only way brands ever really alienate people is by boring them to death. So stick your head above the parapet, place your brand at culture's extremities, and stand for something. It's time to embrace the extremes. You won’t miss out.