‘Gen Z wants its values to be mirrored by brands’

At e4m TechManch 2023, marketers navigated their path through extensive possibilities, shared profound insights, and presented innovative ideas suited for the digital era. One pivotal session highlighted the burgeoning power of the Gen Z audience, delving into strategies for brands to establish successful connections with them, all the while maintaining their allegiance to the millennial demographic.

The panel discussion titled, “Gen Z: Decoding the digital generation”, was chaired by Nikhil Kumar, Vice President - India, South East Asia Middle East, mediasmart. The panellists included Prashant Sukhwani, VP-Marketing, Burger King; Damyant Khanoria, CMO, Oppo; Sunder Balasubramanian, CMO, Myntra, and Abhineet Sawa, Co-founder, Snapmint.

Introducing the session, Kumar said, “In an era defined by digital transformation, we find ourselves at a pivotal crossroads where Gen Z audiences exert an increasingly significant influence on strategies, our choices and the very fabric of a brand. Through our discussion, we aim to uncover the intricacies of Gen Z and their values, their aspirations and their dance with technology.” He then went ahead and asked the panellists how the pandemic has changed decoding the GenZ audience for their brands.

Replying to Kumar, Balasubramanian pointed out the differences between Gen Z and millennial consumers when it comes to fashion. He said, “From a fashion perspective, there is a lot of social validation and social identity that is important for both. But for millennials, the social identity is to fit into a crowd while for Gen Z, it would be a social identity to stand out from within the crowd. I am making a generalization but if millennials look for style, Gen Z looks for trends.”

“Secondly, millennials will look for fashion more than accepted fashion. So, they would look for celebrities, Bollywood or otherwise. Gen Z would look for inspiration, but from more, what they would term as, authentic sources, from more exploratory sources. So, what would be a Kiara Advani in one place would be a Komal Pandey in the other.”

Comparing Gen Z and millennial cohorts, Sukhwani talked about how millennials are still learning technology and Gen Z were born with it making their behaviour significantly different. He elaborated, “They (Gen Z) are far more socially responsible and aware versus millennials who are now learning these new concepts. Because when we were growing these concepts were spoken less compared to the mass acceptability and awareness now and the fact that there is more evolution of help available to all of them.”

He also discussed the fact that both cohorts exist on different platforms and hence should be targeted accordingly. “If you do not isolate these platforms and create content accordingly, you would be carpet bombing hoping that it succeeds rather than customizing and catering to the expectations of Gen Z versus millennials,” Sukhwani added.

Talking about the Gen Z market with respect to the smartphone standpoint, Khanoria mentioned, “What we try to do is bring a sense of hyperfocus. For us it's less about millennials versus Gen Z. It is really about focusing on Gen Z, because one of the truths of consumers, consistent for the last 6-7 decades, is that kids between the age of say 17 or 18 till 22 are the consumers who really drive how the larger economy behaves. These are the guys who are the taste makers of society. And so from OPPO’s standpoint, we bring hyperfocus on Gen Z.”

Khanoria also highlighted how Gen Z has a sense of care about the world around them. He said, “This is not a generation that just talks. They also want this behaviour to be mirrored by brands and that is the kind of brand that they resonate with. They adopt brands that understand their values.”

Sawa discussed how for Snapmint, in terms of financial freedom, their focus was Gen Z. He said, “We had to figure out a small niche to start the brand instead of solving for Gen Z or millennials. We found our focus based on the fact that in the financial world, in terms of online shopping, the millennials were very well equipped with the installments and affordability options they had and the Gen Z segment, on the other hand, was driving a lot of the purchases directly or their purchase decisions on the online platform was highly ill equipped in terms of financial enablement.” So, they lasered their focus on the Gen Z segment,

Sharing the success stories of various Burger King campaigns with respect to how they spoke the language of Gen Z, Sukhwani said, “Gen Z wants brands to be loyal to them rather than the other way round. So, if you design content and comms which mirror their life, without judgment, it tends to do far better and it tends to position your brand better and they stick to your brand.”

Answering Kumar’s question about the launch and target of Myntra FWD, Balasubramanian commented, “One big piece of understanding about this cohort is they are interested in their own world. So for us when Stylecast was across the app, FWD had a place of its own. It is almost if I could loosely call it, an app in an app. When someone gets in there it is that world. So, for Gen Z that is the world that they can look at.”

“Two things that stand out versus the rest of the app is that firstly it is trend first. As you scroll through you will see everything from the listings being as per Barbie Core, Cottage Core, streetwear and so on and so forth. Secondly, it is a lot more visual and video-led as opposed to lots of tiles. Again, based on how Gen Z looks at it,” he elaborated.

Summarizing Oppo’s learnings and growth from having a media-heavy marketing approach to a more nuanced marketing perspective, Sukhwani said, “The young kids are not looking for advertising, they actually actively reject advertising. They are not interested in listening to brand stories. So, what is really important for us as marketers is to understand how we can tell a seamless story using things that they relate to better and that in today's world are influencers. They literally represent a media platform of their own.”

“What we have done fairly aggressively in the last 12 to 14 months is we have not only built an in-house team that is purely working on creating content for Instagram using influencers, telling brand stories, that is one part of it. We are also creating more traditional marketing, we are shooting vertical video first.”

Answering Kumar’s question about the thought process behind Snapmint’s “Badi Khushiyan, Chhoti EMI campaign”, Sawa noted, “EMI as a concept is not something that is new. It has been there forever. But where it made sense for us was that at a Gen Z level the customer was not amenable, they didn't have CIBIL score. So what we had to go after was what are the small categories they are interested in like fashion and gadgets and how do we enable it with the kind of information we have about Gen Z. They don't have a credit score, so what we looked at was their social profile.”