The Gen Z marketing brief has become its own genre of uselessness. Conference slides full of demographic stats. Agency decks that confidently explain what "they care about." Articles that tell you Gen Z wants brands to be "authentic," to "take a stand," to "meet them where they are."
All of it true in a way that's completely useless. True like "make good content" is true — technically accurate, practically empty.
Here's what's actually worth saying.
They didn't grow up online. They grew up knowing how brands work.
There's a meaningful difference. The internet-native framing gets used to explain a lot of Gen Z behavior — the short attention spans, the meme fluency, the distrust of polish. But the more useful frame is this: they grew up in an era when every brand had a social media account, every marketing decision was documented and roasted in real time, and the strategy behind advertising was publicly discussed on YouTube.
They don't just see the ad. They see the brief that probably generated the ad. They have a working model of how brand decisions get made, what a "brand pivot" looks like from inside a boardroom, and exactly what it sounds like when a company is saying something it doesn't mean.
That's a different kind of media literacy. And most marketing still hasn't caught up to it.
"Authentic" means nothing without a corollary.
Authentic is the first word in every Gen Z marketing deck and the least useful word in any of them. Because authenticity isn't a strategy — it's a verdict. It's what the audience decides, after the fact, when the brand did or didn't behave consistently with what it claimed to be.
The more useful question is: does this brand have an actual point of view? Not a purpose statement. A point of view. Something it believes that not everyone agrees with. Something that makes a specific group of people feel understood, at the cost of being unfamiliar to everyone else.
The brands Gen Z is genuinely loyal to aren't unified by their social strategy. They're unified by the fact that they seem to actually know who they are.
Aime Leon Dore, Girls Don't Cry, Madhappy, Liquid Death, New Balance's recent run — none of these brands won with a clever platform play. They won because they're not trying to be slightly different things to slightly different audiences. The specificity is the strategy.
"Meet them where they are" is the wrong brief.
It sounds like a media planning note but gets used as a strategy. The implication: figure out which platforms Gen Z uses and show up there. Which leads to every mid-major brand having a TikTok account that feels exactly like a brand having a TikTok account.
The insight underneath the cliche is that distribution doesn't equal belonging. You can be on every platform where Gen Z spends time and still feel like you're from a different world. Presence isn't relevance. What actually creates relevance is being part of a specific subculture or interest community — not the broad demographic — with enough real depth that you're recognized as belonging there.
The brands that win on TikTok aren't winning because they're on TikTok. They're winning because someone at that brand actually cares about the thing the audience cares about. The medium is almost secondary.
"Take a stand" has an expiration date.
Purpose marketing was already running out of gas when Gen Z became the primary consumer conversation. The problem isn't that brands shouldn't have values — it's that purpose campaigns designed to signal values without any actual operational change became so common that the format itself became suspect.
Gen Z isn't more values-driven than other generations in some abstract sense. They're more hostile to the performance of values in the absence of actual values. There's a difference: the problem isn't the cause, it's the inauthenticity (there's that word) of a brand adopting a position it hasn't earned through how it actually operates.
What actually works.
Be specific. Not "we believe in authenticity" — specific. A point of view on one thing, stated with enough precision that some people immediately understand it and some people are immediately confused. The brands Gen Z trusts tend to have extremely clear worldviews that make obvious who they're for and, implicitly, who they're not.
Earn the subculture before trying to scale it. Don't try to become a streetwear brand in a press release. Be present in the actual spaces — physical, digital, cultural — where the thing you want to be associated with actually lives. Let it develop slowly. The brands that break through tend to have years of legitimate involvement before the mainstream moment.
Stop trying to reach "Gen Z." Start trying to reach the specific Gen Z person who would genuinely care about what you make. The demographic is too large and too internally diverse to address as a monolith. There are Gen Z consumers who are your exact customer. There are far more who aren't. The broad strategy is usually the one that lands with nobody.
The brief.
Most brands approach this generation with the question: how do we win them over?
The better question is: do we deserve them?
That's not a rhetoric trick — it's a strategic reset. If the answer is yes, if there's something real here, something specific, something earned, the marketing almost writes itself. If the answer is "we don't know yet," start there. That's the work before the work.
— Dante Peppermint · A thinking partner for original work.