5 things businesses need to know about Generation Z

January 11, 2016

When I was writing this I did think to myself ‘aren’t we all sick of talking about post-millennials?’ But upon a bit of pre-Xmas digging and realising that these tech-savvy go-getters were going to save Christmas by vowing to spend more than ever before and 66% of iGen claiming to complete Xmas shopping before December 1^st, I thought that there was some life in the old dog yet.

We all know that these Gen Zers are multi-screening, they embarrass the rest of us with their tech knowledge and their insusceptibility to advertising, and they have their finger on the social pulse and have a new channel to live by before the rest of us have updated the Facebook app on our phones. However, I wanted to quantify some of these for businesses and, moreover marketers, to aid them in breaking through to these savvy post-millennials.

So here goes, 5 things that you may not know and will certainly help you to market better to Generation Z them.

Facebook is like… so yesterday, man!

1. Teenagers favour the likes of Snapchat, Whisper and Secret over the larger, mainstream social networks. To put that into perspective, a quarter of 13-17 year olds left Facebook this year.

If you are building a 2020 vision….

2. Know that by then Gen Z will be responsible for 40% of all consumer spend

Oh, you thought second-screening was cool… that’s cute…

3. Where Millennials are generally using 3 screens, the Post-Millennial generation use 5: a phone, a TV, a desktop, a laptop and an iPod or iPad.

I know what you are thinking….”this is all great but they don’t have any money!” Ummm… well, that isn’t quite right actually…

4. In the US alone, a Gen Z gets $16.90 a week in pocket money, which equates to over $44 billion a year in spending power!

5. Beyond their own spending power, they also influence in excess of $600 billion of the family spend a year.