This post is written by Dennis Shiao, Founder of Attention Retention.
I’m familiar with the term “cord cutter,” a person who cut the cord from a pay TV subscription. I came across a related term today and it was new to me:
Cord never.
According to PCMag:
A “cord never” or “never-connected” is someone who never had such a subscription, while “cord shavers” are subscribers who have reduced their pay TV fees by eliminating certain channels.
Let’s consider the approximate age range of different generations:
- Baby Boomer: 60-69
- Gen X: 44-59
- Millennial: 28-43
- Gen Z: 12-27
- Gen Alpha: 11 and younger
I’m generalizing a bit, but I gather that:
- Baby Boomer: Fully corded
- Gen X: Half corded, half cord cutter
- Millennial: One-third corded, two-thirds cord cutter
- Gen Z: Cord never
- Gen Alpha: Ask their parents 😉
I’m a proud member of Gen X. When I started my career in marketing, my audience was mostly Gen X and Baby Boomers. Years later, I began to understand that millennials were now part of my target audience.
The Growing Influence of Gen Z In B2B Purchasing
For B2B products, including high-end B2B technology, I believe Gen Z is now part of the mix, as an influencer on the buying committee or in some cases, the ultimate decision maker. My daughter, a third-year college student, is Gen Z.
Could I as a Gen X do an effective job at marketing to my daughter and her friends? They tend to have a different mindset, with potentially different priorities and core values. There’s also a language barrier. The words they use, especially slang, are different from the ones I use.
When my daughter changes into an outfit she asks me, “fit check?” I think she’s asking me about the fit of her clothes. Instead, she’s asking for input on her outfit. When “rizz” was announced as the Oxford Word of the Year 2023, it was the first time I heard of it.
According to Oxford Languages:
Use of the word as recorded in our corpus has increased dramatically in 2023, with a peak in June 2023, when actor Tom Holland was asked in a widely reported interview about his ‘rizz’, to which he answered, ‘I have no rizz whatsoever, I have limited rizz.’
The word ‘rizz’ can also be used as a verb, often in the phrase ‘rizz up’, which means ‘to attract, seduce, or chat up (a person)’.
A Gen X friend of mine jokingly texted his Gen Z daughter and wrote something like this:
Hey, it’s the rizzer and I’m here to rizz it up.
He was poking fun at the word, but in truth, would he or I be able to connect with Gen Z in an authentic way using their lingo? To Gen Z, I think Gen X has no rizz whatsoever 😜
The Analogy: B2B Content Is Pay TV and Gen Z Are Cord Nevers
Here’s the scary thing 😱 Those of us in Gen X are pay TV. We can survive a few more years marketing to other Gen X. Maybe even some millennials. But Gen Z will be our core audience soon enough.
And they’re cord nevers.
Our B2B content (e.g., eBooks and long form blog posts) is VH1 or Comedy Central programming and our new audience doesn’t subscribe to cable. Let’s not continue producing what we’re used to producing if our audience will ignore it.
How do we adapt?
Let Gen Z Lead You to Gen Z
Who has a better chance of connecting with Gen Z: a Gen X who’s two generations away or a Gen Z peer? A good example is the campaign of John Fetterman, who won a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2022.
good morning everyone, but especially SENATOR ELECT John Fetterman.
— Annie Wu⸆⸉ (all socials: @annie_wu_22) (@Annie_Wu_22) November 9, 2022
They hired Annie Wu Henry to be a part of their digital team. She’s a 26-year-old digital and social media specialist, who:
Describes herself as “zillenial”—someone “very much on the cusp of millennial and Gen Z.”
Wu Henry used TikTok (among other social platforms) to reach other millennials and Gen Z. The Gen X members of Fetterman’s campaign team – and Fetterman himself – would have a much harder time finding the success that Wu Henry did.
Why?
Because they’re not from the platform (i.e., TikTok) and they can’t fully understand a generation that they’re not a part of. In a Slate article Wu Henry said:
You want people who are from these platforms, who understand them, which is, I think, part of the reason why I was brought on the team.
Related quotes from Wu Henry:
- “We’re not the first campaign to do a TikTok, but I think our TikTok was different from many political campaigns. I think it was very engaging, funny, informative, but still very true to who John Fetterman is. We weren’t having him do dances or maybe specific trends that didn’t make sense for him to do, but we were still utilizing trendy sounds or things that people would recognize on the app in a natural way.”
- “I think that there are ways you can overdo it, but there are also ways that you can do it that say “We’re relevant. We understand what’s going on. We’re going to meet people where they’re at, on these platforms, as well as talk the talk, speak their language.”
- “To me, that’s really fun because it’s ever-changing. It is also a challenge because you don’t want anything to come off as inauthentic, or as if you’re just hopping on a bandwagon.”
The takeaway?
To reach a Gen Z audience, hire Gen Z team members to lead the way.
Be Like MrBeast? A Little, At Least
MrBeast is one of the most successful YouTubers, with 226 million subscribers.
These were the most subscribed to YouTube channels of 2023 🥰 pic.twitter.com/nrrhAIdSPk
— MrBeast (@MrBeast) January 1, 2024
Gen Z watches MrBeast and other YouTube personalities. They know what makes these personalities successful, right down to thumbnail composition, titles, descriptions and the programming itself. I’m not suggesting that your B2B videos mimic MrBeast. Instead, I suggest that you have people who follow him help guide the videos you create.
How To Get Started
Maybe you’re not ready to make these moves or don’t think the C-suite will go for it. Here’s a first step:
Find Gen Z among your friends and family and chat with them. Ask them about their content consumption habits, including the people or brands they follow — and why they follow them.
Have them browse your website and watch some of your videos. Ask for a report card. What would make the experience better? What could you do differently to make them notice or care?
Thanks for reading.
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Image credit:
Photo by Tymur Khakimov: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cutting-wire-with-pliers-6412539/