SHANGHAI: China’s Gen Z will represent 40% of the country’s consumers by 2020 – but marketing to them requires a savvy digital and social media strategy, according to a senior agency executive.
Celine Nikolakopoulou, Regional Business Director at Zenith Hong Kong, writing exclusively for WARC, describes this demographic as “culturally hungry, intensely China proud, and eager to strike a physical and emotional balance in their lives”.
At the same time, they are “also caught in the time-honoured struggles of teenagers everywhere: a budding independence, the emergence of individual identity combined with a thirst for peer acceptance, in the midst of rising expectations and pressured life-determining decisions,” she says.
(For more on how to connect with China’s Gen-Z consumers, click here: Marketing to Generation Z in China.)
Gen Z is more digital than any other generation in China: video sites cover 90.6% of consumers born after 1995; 70% of them indicate they like to purchase goods online through social media sites; and they use five screens vs. two for Gen Y, on average.
And they rely heavily on the possibilities of the digital world. “Gen Z in China usually have more virtual than real friends and use social networks as a way to connect to realities and experiences that would otherwise be not accessible to their ‘real me’,” Nikolakopoulou advises.
She portrays a generation that is champion of the “compression era”: more devices (they multitask with five devices), more media (they compress 11 hours of content into 7.5 hours of time), more visuals (they prefer image communication like emojis & memes over words), more dimensions (zoom, pinch, swipe is their normal) but also less attention (eight-second attention span, down from 12 seconds in 2000).
“Doing more is not a distraction with Gen Z and as such, short form, snackable video is thriving among them, explaining the meteoric rise of apps like Douyin and Kuaishou,” says Nikolakopoulou.
“ Short duration ads, skippable content is prized and instant gratification is the norm.”
Celine Nikolakopoulou, Regional Business Director at Zenith Hong Kong, writing exclusively for WARC, describes this demographic as “culturally hungry, intensely China proud, and eager to strike a physical and emotional balance in their lives”.
At the same time, they are “also caught in the time-honoured struggles of teenagers everywhere: a budding independence, the emergence of individual identity combined with a thirst for peer acceptance, in the midst of rising expectations and pressured life-determining decisions,” she says.
(For more on how to connect with China’s Gen-Z consumers, click here: Marketing to Generation Z in China.)
Gen Z is more digital than any other generation in China: video sites cover 90.6% of consumers born after 1995; 70% of them indicate they like to purchase goods online through social media sites; and they use five screens vs. two for Gen Y, on average.
And they rely heavily on the possibilities of the digital world. “Gen Z in China usually have more virtual than real friends and use social networks as a way to connect to realities and experiences that would otherwise be not accessible to their ‘real me’,” Nikolakopoulou advises.
She portrays a generation that is champion of the “compression era”: more devices (they multitask with five devices), more media (they compress 11 hours of content into 7.5 hours of time), more visuals (they prefer image communication like emojis & memes over words), more dimensions (zoom, pinch, swipe is their normal) but also less attention (eight-second attention span, down from 12 seconds in 2000).
“Doing more is not a distraction with Gen Z and as such, short form, snackable video is thriving among them, explaining the meteoric rise of apps like Douyin and Kuaishou,” says Nikolakopoulou.
“ Short duration ads, skippable content is prized and instant gratification is the norm.”
Sourced from WARC
