WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Comprehensive data and expert insights on the state of the internet, mobile devices, social media, and ecommerce.

Generation Z (Gen Z), born after 2000, is the first generation not to have known life without technologies and services such as smartphones, iPads, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Exposure to these technologies and services has influenced this demographic’s broader expectations and behaviors.

We have identified three defining attributes of Gen Zers:

• Gen Zers tend to attach great importance to personal appearance, in large part because they are the first generation to grow up “in public” online, i.e., documenting their lives on social media.
• The pressures presented by social media are encouraging Gen Zers to spend on leisure services, such as vacations, dining out and going out. This is what we call “the Instagram effect.”
• The on-demand economy, ranging from video-on-demand services such as Netflix to dine-on-demand apps such as UberEATS, is making Gen Z the most demanding, least patient generation ever.

US consumers spent $829.5 billion on Gen Zers in 2015, we estimate. Around $66 billion of that total was spent on discretionary categories, while most of it was spent on essential or semi discretionary categories such as housing, food, clothing and transportation.

This transformation echoes the impact of Facebook on the media: there is a dramatic leveling of the playing field. The advantages of scale that guaranteed success in the post-war era just don’t matter very much when advertising is cheap, shelf space is infinite, and shipping is free. And, just as Facebook’s breakdown of the media broke down the political parties, Amazon’s break-down of physical retail will have its own knock-on effects: carrying household supplies is a major reason to own a car, for example, which means Amazon is a laying the foundation for a service like Uber to shift from being a car supplement to a full-on substitution.