Anticipating market trends for the general population is difficult. Imagine trying to decipher those for an age demographic that not only resists your attempts to understand it, but actively rebels and sabotages your best efforts to assist with products it actually needs. Meet Generation Z and a few market trends they inexplicably get behind and probably won’t talk to you about.

If it’s not captured on video, who cares? It would be easy to think the advent of the short viral video is new, but it had its birth years ago with the now defunct Vine and Snap Chat platforms. While we hated commercials disrupting our favorite shows growing up, these kids prefer to give up their attention to brief, spasmodic video bursts.

“Generation Swipe Left” only has a few seconds to spare so marketers are blasting their ads louder and making them brighter. Online purchasing decisions are made from flashy promotional videos, not the text explaining the product, and pricing is barely considered if the music in the background is lit.

No one under 30 wants to talk to you and no one under 20 wants to see you either. All the predictions and fears surrounding an artificial intelligence takeover are now welcomed. The streamlining of menial tasks in the workforce to enable humans to enjoy the benefits of being a professional gamer is the ideal situation.
Jokes aside, adopting AI to power services and brands is the preferred means of interaction with Generation Z. The efficient, reliable, uniformity of dealing with a chatbot has more value than our concerns about job security and privacy. And it allows them to stay on their computer or phone to do it.

The twists and turns a company must make to understand and then market to the values of the youth demographic today is daunting. Cultural shifts have created a new consumer that is unlike anything we have ever seen. Time – and a lot of patience – will only tell whether we are up to this challenge.