#prwswiperight

By Connie Wang

I recently had the opportunity to attend PR Week’s Swipe Right conference in New York – it was a fascinating day-long look at the young people driving today’s consumer landscape: Millennials and Gen-z. Who are they? What do they value? And how can we as marketers and communicators effectively engage with them to build our brands?

 It’s imperative to understand that people and generations are defined by the key social and cultural events that happen in their formative years – their adolescence. For U.S. millennials (born roughly 1980-1995), the tragic event of 9/11 was transformative, while for Gen-Z (born ~1995-2000 on), it was the U.S. financial crisis of 2007-2008. These two key events, along with other milestones such as the advancement of the internet age and proliferation of smart mobile devices, the election of our country’s first black president, and the legalization of gay marriage, have led to a cohort of young people who are broadly defined by values like: Stability. Equality. Making the world a better place. Practical success. And individuality over diversity.

 Values like these are how Millennials and Gen-Z make friends and relate to the people around them. These values also extend to brands. As a Millennial myself, one of the fascinating learnings from Swipe Right was the insight that, our favorite brand is ourselves. We use brands to build ourselves. We don’t buy products, we join brands – but only if they measure up to our values. Below are a few points I’ve taken away from the conference that help define how Millennials and Gen Zers engage with brands:

 Brands Have to Work Harder For Loyalty. But The Right Digital Content Gains Trust. We know, we’re different ❄. According to a survey from Adroit Digital, 78% of young people say brands have to work harder to earn our brand loyalty than they did to earn our parents’ brand loyalty. And we evaluate brands on a different set of criteria – 62% of us feel that digital content drives brand loyalty. Hear that, marketer friends? If you can be authentic – and do it on the channels we frequent, and maybe even tap an influencer friend to help you make the case –we could get into it.

 If You “Wow” Us, We Are All Yours. Case in point: Chieh Huang’s talk at Swipe Right blew me away, and I’m now completely obsessed with his company. As the CEO of Boxed, aka the digital “Costco for millennials”, Huang has infused his values into the culture and way of working at Boxed. For example, they have formalized female employees’ protest of the so-called “pink tax” – the 5-9% in sales taxes levied on “nonessential” feminine products like tampons and razors. Boxed actually discounts prices for these items on their site, to offset the tax that many people find unfair. Add to this a mindset of promoting from within, and generous benefits like paying for employees’ weddings and their kids’ educations – I’m in. Read all about it here.

 The Brand is the Message. Some interesting research from MWW found that one-third of the population, including Millennials and Gen-Z, thinks that the way a company acts is just as important as the stuff it sells. Two-thirds of this segment would pay full price for a product they believe in, and over half would support unsatisfactory products, just because they support the company overall. With these kinds of numbers, brands can’t afford to get it wrong.