#archrival

A porous defense doomed a USC team with College Football Playoff aspirations to a 7–5 record in its second year with Lincoln Riley on the sideline and 2022 Heisman winner Caleb Williams under center. According to ESPN’s Pete Thamel, Riley has found the coach to revamp his struggling defense in 2024, and he didn’t have to leave Los Angeles to do it. USC is finalizing a deal with UCLA defensive…

Easily Confused Words: Archival vs. Archrival

Archival and archrival are easily confused words.

The spell-check application of most word processing software programs would not catch a slip-up of these two words. Spell-check is looking for words that aren’t in its dictionary, and words that resemble words in its dictionary, but are possibly spelled wrong. Spell-check isn’t perfect. It doesn’t know and can’t guess what word you wanted, or…

Key takeaways:

Surveys of Gen Z consumers suggest brands must respond to the crisis by harnessing their community and supporting their employees, without being opportunistic.

Interactive campaigns can foster connections with Gen Z customers, who fear missing pivotal life events.

Young people are natural digital creators. Brands can work with Gen Z consumers to create inspirational new content.

The Covid-19 pandemic has hit during the most formative years of Gen Z’s lives. How brands respond may define their relationship with this important emerging demographic for years to come.

Gen Z consumers, loosely defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, represent 40 per cent of global consumers. They will account for 40 per cent of luxury purchases by 2035.

In the wake of Covid-19, young people fear they will miss out on once-in-a-lifetime experiences like graduation, prom, first jobs and internships, and worry they will always have a mark next to 2020 as a lost year in their development, says Ben Harms, director of insights and strategy at youth consultancy firm Archrival.

Young people say they acknowledge the important struggle people face in this moment, but on a personal level, they feel a huge sense of loss. “Being a senior and having a lot of my ‘lasts’ taken away from me, it's a little heartbreaking,” says 18-year-old high school student Audrey Linzell, one of the 200 Gen Zers consulted by Archrival in the wake of the pandemic.

Social impact consultancy DoSomething Strategic found that those surveyed feel disconnected, sad and frustrated by the situation. And these feelings have grown significantly over the last three weeks, says Meredith Ferguson, managing director at DoSomething Strategic, which surveys its network of five million Gen Zers in 131 countries each week to gauge their responses to the outbreak.

To connect with Gen Z customers right now, brands should engage with them directly through social media activations and marketing campaigns. Most importantly, brands need to come across as genuine in their interactions with customers as well as supportive to the overall cause, says Harms.

Display and uphold company values

Gen Z is the generation most likely to delay purchases during Covid-19, according to GlobalWebIndex. So now is not the time to push sales, but to nurture your community and build brand fidelity, says Ferguson. Brands are instead best served right now by demonstrating community support.

In the first DoSomething survey in mid-March, 75 per cent of Gen Z respondents said the No. 1 action they wanted to see from brands was that they ensure employee and consumer safety, with 73 per cent wanting brands to protect their employees financially. “Young people are attuned right now to how employees are being treated by brands and organisations in particular,” says Ferguson. “That’s where their loyalty lies.”

Brands that share positive messages on social media while failing to support their staff are being noticed. “If you’re not authentic, Gen Z will be the first to raise a red flag. If you are trying to take advantage of the moment, you will lose them so fast,” says Harms.

Among the eight Gen Z consumers that spoke to Vogue Business, most are now avoiding brands like Whole Foods or parent company Amazon because of their perceived lack of protection measures for employees. “I’ve been disappointed by certain companies like Amazon releasing statements of Covid-19 sympathy while refusing to supply their workers with appropriate PPE,” says 21-year-old London-based student Marnie Breadin. “It’s made me rethink which companies I want to buy from after the crisis is over.”

Brands seen to be profiting from this moment have been called out on social media channels by Gen Z audiences. When Fashion Nova sent out a push notification prompting US customers to spend their just-received stimulus cheques, negative responses collected on Twitter, according to 21-year-old Boston University student Jake Brewer.

What positively resonated were Covid-19 brand responses that encourage consumers to support local businesses or to “pay it forward” with buy-one-donate-one schemes for healthcare workers. Justin Knight, a 22-year-old model and musician, referenced local businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area that are donating a mask to a hospital for every mask bought. For Brewer, the Allbirds buy-a-pair-give-a-pair initiative, which provides trainers to front line medical workers, resonated on a personal level after his mother received a pair. While such charitable schemes are often tied up in brand marketing, the overall impression is positive among this generation.

Listen to your community

During the pandemic, Gen Z is seeking more connection than ever. Sixty per cent of Gen Zers across 17 markets are spending longer on social media during lockdown, according to GlobalWebIndex trends manager Chase Buckle. Engaging them in online communities and giving them a way to play a part in Covid-19 relief efforts can create positive brand association. “Brands with a community can reach out to consumers and say, let’s do something together as a community of brand loyalists. And those are the brands that are going to succeed and outlast this crisis,” says Ferguson.

The uncertainty of the situation also means young people want transparency and support. Forty-one per cent of Gen Z’s surveyed by GlobalWebIndex feel they don’t have enough information about staying healthy, compared with 31 per cent of millennials and 23 per cent of Gen Xers. Brands that were able to respond quickly to the outbreak with support and advice showed Brewer that they had a strong sense of community already in place, giving the appearance of natural alignment with their existing values.

Online marketplace Depop encouraged its predominantly Gen Z users to stay at home long before the government-mandated lockdown, says COO Dominic Rose. The company also launched an online Covid-19 help centre for its young user base in the US and UK (one in three 18 to 25-year-olds in the UK are registered on the platform) to answer any questions or concerns they may have about the pandemic. To better understand and support its community of sellers, executives at the company set up communication with a selection of sellers via a WhatsApp group. By working alongside its young community, the platform has seen an uptick in listings, activity and sales, says Rose.

Encourage audience participation

Nike, which has been the No. 1 apparel and footwear brand among Gen Z consumers for 10 years per Piper Sandler, has encouraged people to stay in and exercise at home, publicly donated $15 million to US relief charities and pivoted to manufacturing PPE.

Nike has used its network of professional and amateur athletes in challenges, tutorials and live workout classes.

© Nike

“We were able to lean into the strength of our digital ecosystem to serve and create communities, providing consumers, as well as our athletes, with opportunities to stay active while indoors,” says Heidi O’Neill, president of consumer and marketplace at Nike. The brand was able to act quickly as it learned from teams and consumers in China. “They are helping provide the playbook on engagement and recovery,” she says.

The company made its premium subscription-based Nike Training Club workouts free for all users, redesigned its YouTube channel to focus on home workout content (Nike Master Trainer live classes have been streamed over 800,000 times on the platform according to the brand) and launched weekly challenges like the “Living Room Cup” or “Starting Lineup” challenge, where users introduce their families in a video as if they are being announced at the start of a game.

Brand challenges allow young people to create content while feeling like part of a movement. Gen Z is over 10 times more likely to be creating and uploading videos during lockdown than any other generation, according to GlobalWebIndex, while “challenges” are a common video format popularised by their preferred platform TikTok. The hashtag #startinglineup now has 102,400 views on TikTok. Nike athletes like 23-year-old American football player Saquon Barkley and 11-year-old skateboarder Sky Brown took to Instagram to share their challenge videos. Brown’s video has almost 1 million views.

Tap Gen Z’s creative expertise

As the first digitally native generation, Gen Z is used to shooting content at home for social media and are among the best positioned to reach their peers during this time. As older generations get used to life completely online and make their first forays into activities like esports, live streaming and TikTok, brands could consult and empower the Gen Zers who already know about these platforms and activities instinctively, says Harms.

Plus, young people are seeking purpose during lockdown. “They are so terrified of falling behind because of Covid-19. So they are really trying to optimise this downtime that they didn’t ask for, they want to be creating and cultivating new sides of themselves,” says Bayla Metzger, cultural insights strategist at Archrival.

Unable to shoot its typical prom and summer season campaigns, teen clothing brand Hollister enlisted its community to produce its brand content from home, co-creating their story with Gen Z participants from around the US. Now, their young consumers are featured across emails, on the brand’s website and on social channels in place of models. “They said, ‘You are the face of our brand now,’ and not only is the content amazing, but it performs incredibly well," says Harms. “Gen Z is so good at creating content because they have been doing it since they were 12 years old.”

Gen Z is used to working creatively with limited resources, wrote 21-year-old Kansas University student Halle Alice, “I think this is the time where the most raw and authentic creativity should be spotlighted.”

Some young people even have the tools at hand. “I have a tripod and a ring light at home already that I use for TikTok, so I could shoot for my favourite brands,” says UK-based Lilli Harper, aged 13.