Why isn’t
your business booming? Maybe it’s because you’re not effectively targeting Gen
Z’s. To clarify, Gen Z’s are those who are born in the mid 1990s to the early
2000s. By now, most of the people within this population has a smart phone in
their hand. Therefore, why not take advantage of this and capture some value in
this demographic.
One of the
ways value can be captured in the Gen Z population is through memes. By now, if
you don’t understand what memes are, then clearly your business is failing. If
you’re not a business owner and still don’t understand what memes are, then you
are probably just too old. All jokes aside, memes are essentially pictures that
are supposed to be funny. Think of them as one small segment of a comic strip.
One of the most prolific CEO’s who has a clear understanding of Gen Z behavior
and humor would be Elon Musk. If you just browse his Twitter feed, around 50%
of his tweets are just composed of memes. Although this may seem “unprofessional”
to other companies and CEOs, from a business perspective, his understanding of
memes sets him apart from the rest of the auto industry competitors. Although
there may not be a proven direct cause from Elon’s tweets to his car sales,
there are some correlations to the car sales. Just from Quarter 2 of 2019,
Tesla has outsold some of the top brands of luxury cars in the United States
(CleanTechnica, 2019).
The reason
why Musk’s Twitter account works so well as a marketing ploy for Telsa is because
he understands the habits and behaviors of the younger generation. For example,
according to genzinsights, 97.6% of Gen Zs own a smartphone. If you are a
company or an influential figure such as Elon Musk, if you effectively
implement a successful strategy, you can essentially capture 97.6% of Gen Z
population. Since social media and the internet is such an essential part of
work and home life in today’s society, not utilizing social media as a part of
a marketing strategy would be an outright failure.
However,
just using social media isn’t enough. Like anything else, understanding the
psychology and motivations behind what makes something captivating and not is
important. For example, if you’re a company competing in the retail business.
Scratch that. If you’re a business competing with a sellable product, the one
thing you need to pay utmost attention to is the price. In a survey conducted
by Business Insider, over half the respondents reported price as the deciding
fact to whether they purchase a product or not. However, if that’s the case,
then why are Apple products still so common within the younger generation
(don’t act like you have not seen every other person wear airpods)?
Apple
products can be seen as an exception? Or are they really? In another Business
Insider article, a survey indicated that 83% of teens own an iPhone. And if
you’re a functioning member of this society, then you would agree that Apple
products don’t usually run cheap. So then why? If the stats above say Gen Z’s
are primarily concerned about price, then why isn’t Samsung or Google
dominating the mobile device game? It’s actually much simpler than you would
think. It all boils down to text messaging. Yes, that’s right text messaging.
In a group text, if everyone has a blue message bubble when texting, then it
means everyone is able to receive group texts and pictures seamlessly through a
platform called iMessage. If just one person in a group doesn’t have an iPhone,
the text messages sent between the group will show up as a green text bubble.
These messages are often slow and sometimes the messages gets lost between the
devices. Even sending pictures from an iPhone user to a non-iPhone user is much
slower.
This idea
of an slight inconvenience from a text message may seem silly, but there’s a
bigger picture to this. Whether conscious or not, Apple has embedded into the
minds of individuals that if you don’t buy an iPhone you won’t be able to send
texts to and from your friends with ease. In a sense, they have created a bottleneck
effect: in order to fit in with your friends and send text, pictures and aniemojis
seamlessly, you’ll need to buy an Apple product. It is because of this
bottleneck effect, where it is shown that Apple understands a much broader
behavioral pattern of the Gen Z’s.
This
pattern of behavior is called convenience. Oh how Gen Z’s love convenience. Or
possibly, how we all love convivence nowadays. Take a laptop for example. If
your laptop fails to open or if it lags or the internet shuts down for a brief
amount of time, what happens? Usually frustration or annoyance right? It is
through these slight annoyances in which companies can capitalize and capture
value in their firm.
Technology
has it made so that firms nowadays aren’t trying to necessarily always look at
the competition. More and more companies nowadays are looking at trends and the
way people behave in society. They understand that the children grow up with
technology in their face, thus they understand the inner workings of the
internet much more deeply than other generations. For a company to not focus on
Gen Z’s would be a huge mistake.
Sources:
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/08/10/tesla-cars-1-in-us-luxury-car-sales-in-2nd-quarter-of-2019/
https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-iphone-ownership-creates-culture-of-multitasking-2019-6
https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-shopping-habits-kill-brands-2019-7
https://www.genzinsights.com/hundreds-of-useful-gen-z-stats-right-at-your-fingertips
https://mindstreammedia.com/2019/08/22/beyond-millennials-how-to-market-to-generation-z/
