There was a time when the word "premium" in an advertisement meant something specific: a higher price, a better material, a longer warranty. For Generation Z, the word means something closer to "not lying to me."
Marketers who have spent the last several years chasing this cohort with irony, memes and influencer endorsements are discovering, perhaps belatedly, that the young consumers born between 1997 and 2012 respond with particular enthusiasm to straightforward claims about product quality. The finding would not have surprised anyone who sold goods in 1955, but it arrives as news to an industry that had convinced itself that authenticity meant something other than making a decent product and saying so.
Agency executives, speaking at a recent industry gathering, noted that Gen Z consumers have developed what might charitably be called a finely tuned skepticism toward marketing claims. (Having grown up with a smartphone in one hand and a sponsored post in the other will do that.) The result is a generation that paradoxically trusts brands more when those brands talk less about values and more about value.
"They want to know what they're getting," said one agency executive, who asked not to be named because his clients were still running campaigns built on the opposite theory.
The shift has implications for media strategy as well as messaging. Experiential marketing and social media content — the provinces typically assigned to junior staff members — have become testing grounds for quality-first creative, according to agency leaders. Entry-level talent, they noted, often brings an intuitive understanding of what resonates with their own generation.
Whether the renewed emphasis on product quality represents a lasting correction or merely the latest swing of the pendulum remains, as these things do, a matter for future columns. For now, the oldest sales pitch in the book appears to be new again.
Original story published in adage.com: "Why marketing that emphasizes quality resonates with Gen Z - Ad Age"