GenZ Vie. Monsters or Masters?
Often in marketing, we experience a fear of unknown. GenZ is a bit of the unknown. Especially when it comes to personal choices. Topics like connection, relationships, dating, meeting up & hooking up. For millennial or boomer marketing professionals in Vietnam, it is often confounding to distinguish one from the other, hence we tend to perceive this target as a mystery. Some people so significantly divergent that it begins to attain monstrous proportions. GENZILLA is one such popular and oft repeated term in a multitude of insight reports trying to decode GenZ.
Terms like this tend to polarize our view and forces us to imagine them as a different species. It also fails us at an intellectual level and makes it difficult to fathom the human within this group of people. Often treating them as a bunch of colorful cohorts, dressed in monochromatic funk, sheltered under their bucket hats, floating whimsically in those baggy flannels – almost half human, half droid peering endlessly into a glowing screen.
It is not all marketing and research fault. It is hard to get close. From the outside GenZ gives us very little to peek into them. To truly understand GenZ. One must not try to probe deep. They are best understood from a distance. They need to be observed not questioned. Listen to their songs, read their language, follow their passions and the answers appear. Shielded under the oversized garment and bright color is a m genuine and real human. They care. They believe. They hope. They fear. They love and they love like any other generation before. GenZ is no contradiction. They are crystal clear.
So what makes them different?
To begin with, GenZ is parented by millennials. Since birth they are taught, they can have what they want, they can be who they wish to be. They can achieve what they set their energies on. Everything is attainable and nothing is impossible.
They are also made to believe that they could be whatever they want to be. And no one or anything should be allowed to suggest the opposite. They don’t need to be someone or something else. They do have an opinion. But that opinion doesn't get in the way of what they're really thinking. This is a generation that can differentiate an obstacle from a barrier. This is probably a generation that is best described as THE TINKERERS. Tinkerers are mischievous children. They are experimenters. They enjoy testing and playing with new concepts. What they seek are believers. People and brands who can be a part of this grand adventure. They call it figuring out.
Brands must understand what is their quest, what are they tinkering with, what are they trying to explore and what is the present-day journey. Figuring out is GenZ’s best pastime and their worst fear at the same time.
We need to accept tinkering as a big part of their process of figuring out. It explains why GenZ is into apps Like Tinder and what is it about such apps that they find playful and hopeful at the same time. Where is the thin Line between motivation and hope a grey-space where something could happen. And it could happen for real.
There is a subtle parallel between the Tinkerer and Tinderer. Both are about exploration. Both are about adventure. Both are about figuring out. Both are tickling reality and opening real possibilities. In a way that could become real and everlasting. This is an interesting space between. The are between never-land and the forever-land. And being GenZ is all about diving into this realm of probabilities. Into this adventure. Waiting to find, out waiting to be discovered and waiting to be experienced.
For years, marketers have queried what is most important for this generation… Is it God or Google?
GenZ are masters of living and imagining. The use technology to intersect the multiverse and the real universe. GenZ fully comprehends that the world doesn’t manifests itself. And they themselves have role in the virtual world that could what happens in the real world. Tinkering and tendering is probably one and the same. But done with honesty and spoken with sincerity, it takes on a whole different turn. This is a tribute to a generation of masters who have monstrous powers and are teaching everyone else how to master your own narrative. It is time we addressed them as ‘monstrous masters’
Comments
Post a Comment