Excerpt: Gen Z’s Beauty Turn-ons and Pet Peeves Revealed

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Just when the beauty industry finally put its finger on what makes millennial consumers tick, a younger, more out-spoken generation broke onto the scene. And, just to make things interesting, Gen Z consumers are a far cry from the selfie-snapping generation that came before them.

Sourabh Sharma, head of digital marketing at FIG or out, a digital marketing and PR company, will analyze the top five turn-ons and pet peeves of Gen Z beauty consumers. The following is a quick glimpse of what you can expect.

What they’re here for: inclusivity of physical and mental diversity.

Millennials have been the great cause of the social media and Instagram boom, which has given way to a few societal problems in the areas of mental health issues, phone addiction and self-esteem doubts. Gen Z prefers brands that go out of their way to overcome this, and cater to being beautiful inside out, sans comparisons. 

Similarly, the inclusive visual culture is of utmost importance, and many brands have embraced multicultural and gender-fluid individuals as faces of beauty, with James Charles for Covergirl and Manny Gutierrez (Manny MUA) of Maybelline coming to mind, as well as the Crayola X ASOS gender-fluid makeup line. When dealing with Gen Z beauty consumers,  it is recommended that brands embrace physical diversity and curtail their marketing efforts to not instigate mental health issues further.

What they’ll pass on: experience frills.

With the languishing of experiential marketing, there seems to be a slowness in Instagrammable pop-ups which often do not provide enough ROI for brands. The crux of this is that Gen Z prefers products to experiences. 

Seventy-seven percent of millennials would prefer a cool experience to a product, but a significantly higher 60% of Gen Z prefers a cool product. Brands can thus shift their focus to having the product speak for itself rather than investing marketing in experiences that are likely to be under-appreciated by the youth they are meant for.

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