Hear the word "millennial", and plenty of images spring to mind. There's Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, in his hoodie, earning his first billion by the age of 23. There's Miley Cyrus, preening for the cameras in a flesh-baring act that recalls a Snapchat sexting session. There's Lena Dunham, TV's queen of overshare, spiralling into navel-gazing soliloquies that seem scripted from the therapist's couch. They're brash, they're narcissistic, they're entitled. Or so the cliche goes.
But what about “Generation Z”, the generation born after millennials that is emerging as the next big thing for market researchers, cultural observers and trend forecasters? With the oldest members of this cohort barely out of high school, these tweens and teens of today are primed to become the dominant youth influencers of tomorrow. Flush with billions in spending power, they promise untold riches to marketers who can find the master key to their psyche.
No wonder the race to define, and market to, this demographic juggernaut is on. They are "the next big retail disrupter", according to Women's Wear Daily. They have "the weight of saving the world and fixing our past mistakes on their small shoulders", according to an article on Fast Company's website by Jeremy Finch, an innovation consultant. Lucie Greene, the worldwide director of the Innovation Group at J Walter Thompson, calls them "millennials on steroids".
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While it is easy to mock the efforts of marketers to shoehorn tens of millions of adolescents into a generational archetype, a la the baby boomers, it is also clear that a 14-year-old in 2015 really does inhabit a substantially different world than one of 2005.
Millennials, after all, were raised during the boom times and relative peace of the 1990s, only to see their sunny world dashed by the September 11th attacks and two economic crashes, in 2000 and 2008. Theirs is a story of innocence lost. Generation Z, by contrast, has had its eyes open from the beginning, coming along in the aftermath of those cataclysms in the era of the war on terror and the Great Recession, Greene says.
"If Hannah Horvath from Girls is the typical millennial – self-involved, dependent, flailing financially in the real world as her expectations of a dream job and life collide with reality – then Alex Dunphy from Modern Family represents the Gen Z antidote," Greene says. "Alex is a true Gen Z: conscientious, hard-working, somewhat anxious and mindful of the future."
Generational study being more art than science, there is considerable dispute about the definition of Generation Z. Demographers place its beginning anywhere from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. Marketers and trend forecasters, however, who tend to slice generations into bite-size units, often characterise this group as a roughly 15-year bloc starting around 1996, making them five to 19 years old now. (By that definition, millennials were born between about 1980 and 1995, and are roughly 20 to 35 now.)
Even accepting those rather narrow boundaries, Generation Z still commands attention through its sheer size. Generation Z outnumber their endlessly dissected millennial older siblings, according to census data compiled by Susan Weber-Stoger, a demographer at Queens College in New York. The fact that some are still in their post-toddler years, however, makes it difficult for marketers trying to distill their generational essence. Among the five-year-olds, cultural tastes do not reach much further than Shaun the Sheep and Bubble Guppies.
As for the older end of the Generation Z spectrum, some demographers still lump them in with the millennials, but increasingly, many marketers see them as a breed apart. So, who are they? To answer that question, you have to take a deeper look at the world in which they are coming of age.
"When I think of Generation Z, technology is the first thing that comes to mind," says Emily Citarella, a 16-year-old high school student in Atlanta, Georgia. "I know people who have made their closest relationships from Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook. "
Sure, millennials were digital; their teenage years were defined by iPods and MySpace. But Generation Z is the first generation to be raised in the era of smartphones. Many do not remember a time before social media. "We are the first true digital natives," says Hannah Payne, an 18-year-old UCLA student and lifestyle blogger. "I can almost simultaneously create a document, edit it, post a photo on Instagram and talk on the phone, all from the user-friendly interface of my iPhone. Generation Z takes in information instantaneously," she adds, "and loses interest just as fast."
That point is not lost on marketers. In an era of emoji and six-second Vine videos, "we tell our advertising partners that if they don't communicate in five words and a big picture, they will not reach this generation", says Dan Schawbel of Millennial Branding, a New York consultancy.
Online persona
So far, they sound pretty much like millennials. But those who study youth trends are starting to discern big differences in how the two generations view their online personas, starting with privacy. While the millennial generation infamously pioneered the Facebook beer-bong selfie, many in Generation Z have embraced later, anonymous social media platforms like Secret or Whisper, as well as Snapchat, where any incriminating images disappear almost instantly, says
Dan Gould
, a trend consultant for Sparks & Honey, an advertising agency in New York.
But the difference between generations goes much deeper than choosing Snapchat over Facebook. Between 2000 and 2010, in the US the Hispanic population grew at four times the rate of the total population, according to the Census Bureau. The number of Americans self-identifying as mixed white-and-black biracial rose 134 per cent. The number of Americans of mixed white and Asian descent grew by 87 per cent.
Those profound demographic shifts are reflected at the cultural level, too. Attitudes on social issues have shifted, in some cases seismically, in the decade since millennials were teenagers. Same-sex marriage, for example, has gone from a controversial political issue to a constitutional right. For today’s 14-year-olds, the first African-American US president is less a historic breakthrough than a fact of life.
But the parents of Generation Z teenagers play an equally powerful role in shaping their collective outlook. Millennials, who are often painted, however unfairly, as narcissistic brats who expect the boss to fetch them coffee, were largely raised by baby boomers, who, according to many, are the most iconoclastic, self-absorbed and grandiose generation in history. Think: Steve Jobs.
By contrast, Generation Z tends to be the product of Generation X, a relatively small, jaded generation that came of age in the funk of the 1970s, when horizons seemed limited. Those former latchkey kids, who grew up on Nirvana records and slasher movies, have tried to give their children the safe, secure childhood that they never had, says Neil Howe, an economist and the co-author of more than a dozen books about US generations.
“You see the mommy blogs by Generation X-ers, and safety is a huge concern: the stainless-steel sippy cups that are BPA-free, the side-impact baby carriages, the home preparation of baby food,” says Howe, who runs Saeculum Research, a Virginia-based social trends consultancy. (As a historian who takes the long view, however, Howe defines the cohort quite differently; he has called it the “Homeland Generation” because they grew up in post-9/11 America, and argues that it did not begin until around 2004.)
Hardship
Part of that obsession with safety is likely due to the hard times that both Generation Z members and their parents experienced during their formative years. “I definitely think growing up in a time of hardship, global conflict and economic troubles has affected my future,” says Seimi Park, a 17-year-old high school senior in Virginia Beach who always dreamed of a career in fashion but has recently shifted her sights to law because it seems safer.
"This applies to all my friends," she says. "I think I can speak for my generation when I say that our optimism has long ago been replaced with pragmatism." Put it all together – the privacy, the caution, the focus on sensible careers – and Generation Z starts to look less like the brash millennials and more like their grandparents (or, in some cases, great-grandparents), Howe says. Those children of the late 1920s through the early 1940s, members of the so-called Silent Generation, were shaped by war and the Depression and grew up to be the diligent, go-along-to-get-along careerists of the 1950s and 1960s: picture Peggy from Mad Men.
“The parallels with the Silent Generation are obvious,” Howe said. “There has been a recession, jobs are hard to get, you can’t take risks. You’ve got to be careful what you put on Facebook. You don’t want to taint your record.”
Those children of the New Deal, epitomised by the low-key Warren Buffett, "didn't want to change the system, they wanted to work within the system," Howe says. "They were the men in the grey flannel suits. They got married early, had kids early. Their first question in job interviews was about pension plans."
That analogy only goes so far for a generation predisposed to making Vine videos of themselves doing cartwheels over their cats. (Let's not forget that the Silents, too, had no shortage of mavericks who made noise on the world stage: Martin Luther King Jr, Elvis Presley and Andy Warhol, to name but a few.) As for the grey flannel suits, parents may not want to send their teenagers off to the tailor just yet. The Sparks & Honey report argues that "entrepreneurship is in their DNA".
"Kids are witnessing start-up companies make it big instantly via social media," says Andrew Schoonover, a 15-year-old in Olathe, Kansas. "We do not want to work at a local fast-food joint for a summer job. We want to make our own business because we see the lucky few who make it big."
Which leads to a final point worth mentioning about the Silent Generation. As Howe points out, it was not just the most career-focused generation in history. It was also, he says, the richest. – (The New York Times News Service)
