The high point on the rising tide of influence for Gen Z is “earned media”—the online equivalent of people talking about you at the water cooler or around town.
If you can (and we believe you most definitely can) tap the power of earned media, your dependence on paid or owned media to buy mindshare is radically altered. You know you have “street cred” when you are no longer forced to buy attention. This sort of respect from the marketplace creates a demand that brings you more influence through which you can grow and expand, based on the trust you have earned with your customers and fans.
Earlier generations did not have the ability to form communities and to influence the behaviors of society in the way Gen Z will. Stephanie Fischer, president and CEO of the Global Retail Marketing Association, put it well when she told us, “Meaning is the new money. These kids care about the DNA of your organization, you really have to be able to do things that are meaningful to them.
They influence each other more than any generation out there because they’re always connected. If you’re a businessperson and you’re having a very meaningful relationship with this generation, they’re going to be your best brand advocate. They’ll be your best marketers.”
We would add that, conversely, if you don’t do well by them, they could also be your worst nightmare. Previous generations had the option to demonstrate against or to boycott a product or company—even a government—but only if they could effectively enlist the media in their cause. Gen Z doesn’t need to win over the media gatekeepers; they have the ability to wreak havoc on companies and even governments through the influence they wield as a hyperconnected community.
One of the greatest success stories we’ve seen in this area of hyperconnected community comes from the nonprofit Free the Children, a global organization whose mission is to create a world where all young people are free to achieve their fullest potential as agents of change. In just under two decades Free the Children has had an enormous global impact, with 2.3 million youth members between the ages of twelve and eighteen in forty-five countries. The organization has built 650 schools and schoolrooms, delivered more than $16 million worth of medical supplies, and provided one million people with clean water, health care, and sanitation, all without spending a single penny on paid marketing.
The story behind the organization is the stuff Gen Z is made of, and as inspiring as its achievements are, we’d guess that you’ve never heard of the organization. Craig Kielburger started Free the Children in 1995 when he was
just twelve years old. As Craig tells the story, one morning he was flipping through the Toronto Star in search of the comics when he came across an article that caught his eye. It was about a courageous boy his age named Iqbal Masih who had been born in South Asia and sold into slavery at the age of four. For the next six years Iqbal was chained to a carpet-weaving loom. After being freed, he captured the world’s attention by speaking out for children’s rights. Iqbal’s actions also caught the attention of those who profited from debt slave labor and who wished to silence him. At twelve, Iqbal lost his life defending the rights of children.
Kielburger was so moved by Iqbal’s story that he gathered together a small group of seventh-grade classmates, including his brother Marc, and Free the Children was born. We talked to Marc Kielburger about some of the dramatic shifts he is seeing in Gen Z through the unique lens of what has become one of the most influential Gen Z nonprofits in the world.
Kids are more communal than ever but their community is not local anymore;
it’s global, and they have a global outlook, a global perspective.
The interesting thing that we find in our interaction and engagement with young people is that community to them is probably the single most important piece of their identity.
It’s much more important and significant than with previous generations; to them community is a sense of belonging, purpose, meaning, and acceptance—
and their community, of course, is very much online. Young people will most support the communities they’ve decided to belong to. It’s their decision as opposed to it being thrust upon them.
When you stop to think about the degree of connectedness that Gen Z has been born into, it makes perfect sense that community would be such a central part of their lives. It’s not that community in some form has not always been important.
The difference with Gen Z, however, is that the community is a conscious choice that comes from within rather than something that is imposed from the outside, and they are drawing from a much larger, global set of communities. For those born into Gen Z, though, a far more transparent and connected culture has been their default condition, making the issue of “conscious” choice debatable, at least during their childhood.
Marc Kielburger also echoed the themes of influence that we’ve described as percolating up from younger members of Gen Z.
First, kids today feel more empowered than any other generation. They know that they don’t have to wait until they’re eighteen to vote to have an impact.
They know that they can have impact now.
Second, it’s no longer about trying to simply market to kids. It’s about starting a conversation with them to make yourself part of their community, whereby that young person can actually have a conversation about the brand or the values of the brand.
Third, is the influence that they have with their parents. The reason this is relevant is that they’re more tech savvy, they’re more knowledgeable, they’re more likely to speak up, they’re more empowered.
He is passionate about the fact that Gen Z kids have much more influence with their parents than generations before them ever had, and he sees this as critical for companies to understand, whatever age they are trying to influence.
These kids are on a level playing field with their parents because they have access to information, and they have access to technology, and they know technology better than their parents do. I feel these parents actually constantly defer to their kids because the parents don’t have the same level of understanding as their kids probably do.
So, if I were a car company assessing the impact of advertising on my consumer, I would be marketing to teenage girls to push their parents to buy a hybrid. I wouldn’t be marketing to their parents. The impact of a teenage girl saying, “Mom and Dad, don’t you care about the world I’m going to inherit?” is going to be much more significant than just about anything else I could do.
We asked Kielburger to help us see the issue of loyalty through the eyes of the kids he works with, and he talked about one of the most significant aspects of developing trusted relationships with Gen Z.
The whole concept of traditional loyalty is dead, and what we need to do is specifically focus on “How do we build mutual understanding within the goals of this generation?”
The reason is that if brands aren’t aligning in a genuine way—and I can’t stress the word “genuine” enough—with causes, or issues, or campaigns, or things that they care about, or values in the community, young people will go to those brands that are.
We say to our young people [Free the Children volunteers and members] all the time that, “You vote every single day with your wallets, not your ballots,”
and they get that. I don’t think a lot of brands get it.
We have the largest Facebook cause in the world now. The reason being that we recognize the power of young people to have genuine conversations with each other.
This sort of indirect metric of influence works in others areas as well. For example, in the venture philanthropy space we’ve worked with many large funds, especially in health care, that similarly measure the impact of their investments in terms of ultimate cures. If you’re seeking to cure a particular type of cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or multiple sclerosis, it’s exceptionally hard to find intermediate points of influence for your investment. Either you create a therapy that works or you don’t. There is no return on investment for research that does not create long-term tangible results.
However, the ability to measure intermediate results is a critical part of the way for-profit businesses determine the effectiveness of their influence through marketing. This ability to measure and use the resulting “Internet of influence”
has only surfaced in the last twenty-five years with the rise of the web and social apps, despite the Internet having existed for more than forty-five years.
Measurement of influence has become one of the principle drivers in the shift from affluence to influence, as it provides mechanisms for precisely identifying how influential all points on that spectrum really are.