With Gen Z becoming a much bigger focus for marketers as younger audiences move into more lucrative spending brackets, platforms like Snapchat are well-placed to become key sources of insight into important trends and shifts that will ultimately define purchase behaviors.

Indeed, Snapchat claims to reach some 90% of 13-24 year-olds across the US, more than Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger combined in that age bracket. That means the platform can not only enable connection but provide more knowledge as to what these consumers are looking for.

And this week, Snap, in partnership with Kantar, has shared some valuable new insights into evolving brand and content preferences, and how they're being defined by the next generation of consumers.

The study incorporates over 12,000 respondents spread across six countries: Australia, Canada, France, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and the United States - looks specifically at why Gen Z consumers choose particular brands, and how businesses can leverage those trends. The company states that in a youth audience, it becomes somewhat more difficult for a new brand to break through when each respondent has clear alignment with 1-3 brands in each category.
 According to Snap:

This might be partly because many Gen Zers report expressing themselves through their choices of brands. For example, in every market save Saudi Arabia, we see that Gen Z reports letting brands express who they are more than do older generations. For example, 65% of Gen Zs say they use brands to say something about who they are, up from 40% for Gen X and baby boomers.

Brand preferences are tied to identity, which is an important consideration in your marketing approach when looking to appeal to younger audience segments. 

So what, specifically, drives that brand alignment? Snapchat probed a little deeper, and formulated this comparison of brand preference factors, versus Gen X/Boomers.
Brand affinity, through caring about customers, about the environment and broader community, provides some clear considerations for your marketing and outreach efforts.

Another element is advocacy, and this generation - Gen Z - relies less on other generations to depend on the opinions of their friends and family.

Part of that, of course, is that such recommendations are now much easier to come by, as you can see what people like and advocate for via social media. Past generations didn't always have this as a reference point, so it makes sense that they're less instinctively reliant on the same.

But Gen Z has learned to live in the modern communications environment, which emphasizes the need to activate advocacy via influencers and regular customers on social networks.

Besides that, the study also addressed the issue of the impact of advertising on Gen Z, and the reaction of younger consumers towards brand content.

And the facts show that Gen Z consumers are quicker at consuming information compared to older generations.
As stated by Snap:
"We found that Gen Z research participants spent less time viewing content than did Millennial and Gen X/Baby Boomer participants, both for commercial and non-commercial content. More interestingly, however we also found that Gen Z participants recalled the commercial and non-commercial content they experienced at very high rates".

It seems that we’re evolving to filter the vast flood of information being sent towards us each day faster - which makes sense, but could also be an important consideration in assessing the impact of your ad efforts. Younger consumers spending less time with your content doesn’t necessarily indicate lower interest.
The proliferation of Snaps, Stories, TikTok clips - what we’re seeing with these trends is the acceleration of media. No longer do people need to sit down with a full, two-hour movie - because younger people are now used to being able to skip through and get the gist, they’re increasingly attuned to shorter, denser content forms.

This is once again an important consideration for your messaging: while storytelling, and always will be, important, it is worthwhile to take the time to note emerging trends in such, and how you might align your messaging to these more condensed, expressive forms.

Because you do not need to hold the attention of people for as long as you used to and given the poor reputation of interruptive ads, you would probably be better off dialing back to the bare essentials and keeping the message as short as you possibly can to maximize responses.

That can be a hard shift to make, as we’ve been attuned to sharing information in certain ways through traditional best practices and learned behavior. But those behaviors are changing, which is important to note.