Hello,

This week is not about your business. It is about your customer's business.

You sell to brands, retailers, manufacturers, distributors. They sell to people, and a fast-growing share of those people are under thirty. Your customers are going to have to talk to them properly, and most of them are getting it wrong right now.

You do not need to become an expert on nineteen-year-olds. You need to be the person in the meeting who knows one useful thing about them that nobody else knows.

There is no such thing as “the Gen Z shopper.”

The group spans about fifteen years. A fourteen-year-old in school and a twenty-eight-year-old paying rent have almost nothing in common. What makes them look like one audience is that they are the first generation to pass through every life stage on the same platforms, so their behaviour looks similar from outside while what they want underneath is completely different.

When your customer says “we need a Gen Z strategy”, they are describing three buyers and funding one campaign. That is why it does not work.

Their spending is down. Living costs are up, budgets are tight, credit stress is real. And yet they are reshaping retail more than any other group. Less money, more influence.

What changed is the route. They discover products online, through short video and reviews and creators. Then a large share of them walk into a physical shop to see the thing, check the colour, feel the material. Discovery online is not replacing stores. It is sending people to them with a specific product already in mind.

So the shop stopped being a shop. It is becoming somewhere people meet friends, see a pop-up, spend an afternoon. And the clock got faster: a trend now moves from a feed to a shelf in days.

That last part is not a marketing problem. It is a forecasting, replenishment and lead-time problem, and it lands on your desk.

Look at what this group listens to when nobody is selling to them.

True crime listening among Gen Z grew 13% in a year, with college-aged listeners up 20%. But what changes inside the group is the useful part. The youngest go broad and spooky: horror, the paranormal, conspiracy. College-aged listeners drop all of that and pivot to real money risk. By their late twenties it moves again, to forensics and dark comedy.

A fortyfold jump in interest in financial exploitation is not entertainment. That is a generation researching how people like them get taken advantage of, because they assume it will happen to them.

Their shopping matches exactly. They compare prices carefully, wait for discounts that are actually discounts, and increasingly use apps and AI tools to check a price is fair before committing.

Which means confident claims with nothing behind them do not read as confident to this buyer. They read as the setup to something. For your customer, evidence is not a nice-to-have. It is the condition of entry.

Send this one to the person who runs your customer meetings. It is the line that wins the room.

Context: true crime listening among Gen Z grew 13% year on year, college-aged up 20%.

As they get older, their interest moves from the supernatural to the financial to the forensic.

Source: Spotify Culture Next 2026. Spotify first-party data, US, free and premium users, 2025 vs 2024; analysis conducted using Quilt.ai, US, 2026.

Two separate pieces of research say the same thing from different directions, which is usually a sign it is real.

The behavioural one: this group buys store brands without hesitation, buys second-hand without embarrassment, actively hunts for cheaper lookalikes of expensive products, and cuts back on everyday costs specifically so they can still afford small treats. The spending did not disappear. It moved.

The cultural one: over a million playlists now exist built around the word ‘aura’, and listening to them grew 284% in a year among the youngest in the group. Aura is how they talk about status. Not what you own, but how you carry yourself. It has almost nothing to do with price.

Plenty of companies still describe themselves as premium, exclusive, elevated. To a twenty-two-year-old that is not aspirational, it is just expensive, and they have a cheaper lookalike open in another tab.

For your side of the chain this is good news. A generation that does not need the famous name on the box but still wants the quality inside it is the strongest argument for private label in years.

One warning: do not put the word ‘aura’ in anything. Borrowed slang from a company is instantly obvious and it ages the brand.

Aura is how this generation talks about confidence and status. It is not about what you own.

Source: Spotify Culture Next 2026. Spotify first-party data, user-generated playlists containing 'aura', US, April 2025 to March 2026 vs April 2024 to March 2025; analysis conducted using Quilt.ai, US, 2026.

Paste under your own name.

Pick the customer you are closest to. Not the biggest, the one who takes your calls. Ask them: “who is your youngest growing customer group, and what do you actually know about them?” Then be quiet and listen. Most people have never been asked this by a supplier.

Then send them the one thing from this email that applies to their category. Three sentences, in your own words. That is where you stop being a line on a purchase order.

There is nothing to buy in this email. One favour instead.

Send it to a colleague, to your boss, or to a friend who runs a business that sells to anyone under thirty. That last one especially. Most of them can feel this coming and have no idea what to do about it yet.

If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here. One email, Tuesday mornings. Read a few back issues first if you would rather see what you are signing up for.

Brave New Media is a boutique B2B media and marketing agency. Small team, we work globally.

We have only just started talking about ourselves in public, so it is completely fair if you are a little surprised to be getting email from a company with almost no footprint. We spent years doing the work and close to no time telling anyone about it. That was a choice, and on reflection it was the wrong one.

It is changing quickly now, and on purpose. We are moving fast and taking ground while most of the category is still deciding whether any of this matters.

Glad you are here for it. Let us grow together.

If you want to reply, it comes straight to me and I read every one.

See you next Tuesday.

Anne, Senior Marketing Strategist,
Founder of Brave New Media

The Brave New Business Journal · Issue 16