“When I see brands get Gen Z wrong, we’re trying to put them in a box”: Understanding Zoomers’ purchasing behavior

Earlier this week, we shared how Goldfish is winning over Gen Z, recapping our chat with Danielle Brown, the VP of cookies and crackers at Campbell’s. But Retail Brew’s recent Checkout forum was packed with more insights.

We also spoke to Claire Tassin, managing director of retail and e-commerce analysis at Morning Consult, to shed some selfie ring light on the generation. Here are a few takeaways from our conversation:

💵 The price is right: “When you think about who Gen Z is, where they’re shopping, we know there’s a lot of price sensitivity within that generation,” Tassin told us, adding that a part of this is because a lot of Zoomers are at the early stages of their careers (if they’ve even started working yet). “But there’s also a sense of, ‘I’m going to get the best bang for my buck.’ A lot of what drives their purchasing is value, like everyone.”

❌ Red light, green light: “When I see brands get Gen Z wrong, we’re trying to put them in a box and say that they are this completely different brand new animal that we’ve never seen before,” Tassin said. But when she digs into “what drives Gen Z’s purchasing behavior…we see that the same things that drive everyone else, like I mentioned—good value for your dollar, being trustworthy in terms of having good customer service—these are all things that matter way more to Gen Z than things like sustainability.”

If you’re caught off guard, Tassin breaks it down further: “Sustainability absolutely matters to Gen Z—it matters to Gen Z more than any other generation. But I think where we tend to see brands misstepping is when we think that they only care about one thing, when we kind of think about them as the young activist generation, and forget that we’ve still got to win them on the basics and on the table stakes.”

🛍️ Where are we? Gen Z is always online, Tassin said, but “when it comes to shopping specifically though, you see that online-offline blend more so than any other generation.”

• “They do generally prefer to shop in stores, but they’re also least likely to have a preference overall, meaning that they don’t necessarily see as much differentiation between all of the channels that they have to tap into to connect with different brands. So they’ll catch us on TikTok, they’ll come to our websites, and if we do have a physical presence, they’ll come there too, which means they can be really hard to keep up with.”

🦫 Put in the work: And even if a brand gets everything right, stay on your toes. “What’s hard about Gen Z is you can win their loyalty, but also, you kind of have to keep earning it over and over and over again because they’re going to keep reevaluating you,” Tassin explained. “They’re going to keep holding you accountable to how you won them in the first place.”

Click here to catch the entire conversation.—GT