ESL 204 – Online Reading Comprehension #2 – CP, Unit 2

-1- The next wave of consumers none of whom has ever known a world without the Internet or mobile devices has
come of age. Here are some insights on how to reach them and adjust or modify your marketing strategies.

-2- Meet the Generation Z, also referred to as Gen Z, iGen, Centennials and possibly several other names. Oldest
members of this generation were born in 1999. By the 2020s, they will be the largest category of consumers worldwide,
making up 2.6 billion people globally. Gen Z’s spending power is projected to be $44 billion. It is, therefore, becoming
crucial to reveal habits of your future customers. Without understanding and acknowledging them and their attributes,
you will be losing potential future revenue.

-3- Although they live in an age of rapidly advancing technological innovations, Gen Zers remain pragmatic when
choosing brands or deciding where to shop. Unfortunately for eCommerce-only businesses, recent findings from a study
conducted by IBM on Gen Z demonstrate that while smartphones are keeping them up to date, they are not keeping
Gen Z out of physical stores. They still value that touch-and-feel, person-to-person shopping experience (…). Yet bear in
mind that Gen Zers may lose some of their bond and affinity for physical stores as they gain responsibilities, lose free
time and get access to credit cards.

1
Professor: Eric Buisson – Education Department – Concordia University
-4- Here are a few tips and tricks to illustrate how to create more interactive and ongoing engagement around your
brands in order to meet the needs of the most complex and yet most critical shoppers of all time.

Personalize the buying experience

-5- For Gen Z, dependence on mobile phones is a way of life. The only way to truly get on the radars of this age group is
to deliver smooth buying experience that offers related information to them, one-to-one recommendations and an
intuitive checkout process at all times. If your eCommerce site falls short in any of these areas, Gen Zers will swiftly
move on to the next competitor. According to Forbes, the attention span of Gen Zers is estimated at just 8 seconds,
compared to 12 seconds for Millennials. In other words, only personalized, thumb-stopping information will grab their
attention.

-6- Therefore, how will you serve all the “right” and appropriate information to your Gen Z customers? Data. It is
fundamental that you use the acquired data to consistently engage your customers, learn their buying behaviours,
history of prior purchases, gather information from them and use real-time data -- such as location and time -- to create
offerings tailored to their needs. Chatbots and virtual assistants are already being experimented to enable brands to
communicate with customers in powerful and direct ways at reduced cost.

-7- For now, real-time customer service is just about enough to keep Gen Zers from feeling frustrated and make their
customer journey fast and pleasurable. In the near future, connecting with them on individual levels will definitely lead
to a higher engagement and, as a result, trigger conversions.

Voice is changing the way we search

-8- First popularised by Siri, but taken further by Amazon’s Echo and Google Home, the growth of virtual voice assistants
is pretty obvious. Although some experts believe that the full potential of voice search has yet to be seen, 1 in 3 Gen Z
digital consumers in North America is regularly using voice search/commands on their smartphones (with rates also high
among the older Millennials). We are just at the beginning of what probably will be a long and constant incline in the
trends for voice search implementations, so this is the time to begin optimizing your website SEO (Search Engine
Optimization). Focusing on long-tail keywords or even creating the entire sentences will provide voice search-friendly
environment for your future shoppers. For every eCommerce this only means one thing: The ways new generations will
be searching for your products are drastically changing and now is the time to start thinking about what this rise means
for your business.

Omnichannel

-9- The idea is to give the Generation Z freedom to reach you via the communication channel they feel most
comfortable using. Instead of viewing social media solely as a way to keep in touch and get involved with friends and
family members, Gen Zers don’t think twice about engaging with a brand online. According to Nublue, the customer
journey of a modern user switches seamlessly between touchpoints: embracing in store, as well as online and offline.
Gen Zers are not really known for their loyalty, so you need to constantly keep these youngsters “on the radar” on many
different platforms to remind them about your offerings.

-10- The fact that Gen Zers can’t live without YouTube shows that YouTube is the clear winner for omnichannel social
media. Use videos to capture the attention of your younger audience. Remember that their attention span is much
shorter than that of any generation before and that while they are watching your video, they are probably texting
someone. Most successful videos are engaging, dynamic and under 2 minutes. This is how a retail giant as Asos uses its
YouTube channel. By offering short and fun “Learn how to…” and similar videos, Asos helps its audience to understand
its products and its brand. Not only are people at Asos consistently nourishing their YouTube channel, they are also
successfully closing the gap in customers’ omnichannel experience by offering the same caliber of experience on the rest

2
Professor: Eric Buisson – Education Department – Concordia University
of their social media platforms. The bottom line is to truly connect your channels in order to create a single, unified
brand that will allow your customers to feel valued and create and reinforce an engaging environment for them.

Prepare yourself

-11- Generation Z is sharp, engaged, socially connected and confident. Fundamentally, they are just like the teens of
previous generations, but with new tools to express emotions, discover information and be influenced. The most
exciting dimension about this generation is that we will be able to understand them more than any other generation
thanks to advances in technology, research and online data collection. Understanding their behaviour, motivation and
dynamics means being prepared to meet their needs, today and in the decades to come, as with them the old rules of
retail no longer apply.

Maja Kokolari, Inchoo Website, January 15, 2018

Freely adapted from: https://inchoo.net/ecommerce/are-you-ready-for-generation-z-ecommerce/

3
Professor: Eric Buisson – Education Department – Concordia University