Gen Z, very young people or whatever do you want to call them, are a tougher nut to crack than older people when it comes to gathering data about them, data of interest for all the brands who are trying to lure or maintain them as customers.
There are a lot of currently accepted, you can say even common-sense ideas, about what a brand should do to in order to perform well in today’s market, such as:
· „Customer is King”
· „Successful brands are customer-centric”
· and its corollary „Successful brands are listening to their customers”
· „In our times, technology is crucial for success”
· „Gen Z and smartphones are inseparable” and stuff like that.
But why, when it comes to marketing research, some brands are paying only lip service to these ideas?
Of course, I’m not saying there are no data about them – in fact, the omnipresence of the Internet in modern life, with the associated online activity tracking technologies, generates mountains of Big Data about Gen Z (and lots of other people, for that matter). These mountains of data let brands know a lot of stuff about what Gen Z does, but still very limited, in a crucial way. Big Data doesn’t provide too much information, if any, about why they do what they do, about what drives them.
And here comes the „traditional” marketing research, helping to shed more light on these issues. But in order to be really helpful, it needs to be properly deployed, which unfortunately is not always the case.
A lot of sources, including our internal data, confirm that mobile is by far the main device for completing surveys – especially so for Gen Z.
Also, it’s a well-known research industry fact that the time for long questionnaires has long passed. Unless it’s a subject about which they are really passionate, it’s difficult for most people to maintain focus for more than 15-20 minutes; Gen Z are usually even more impatient.
Yet there are still projects where we see long and sometimes tedious questionnaires, some of which are not even mobile optimized, and yet are expected to gather answers from Gen Z respondents too.
Here at Data Diggers, we strive to keep all our panel members always engaged, both young and less young, but we can do only so much.
The burden should rest on us, marketeers and researchers; it’s up to us to struggle to create catchier surveys that make answering as simple as possible for Gen Z respondents, the hardest fish to catch, so to speak. A carefully designed, simple and friendly questionnaire makes all the effort worthwhile, because all the respondents, no matter how young or old, will enjoy it more, maintaining full focus the whole time and thus you will gather the most relevant data possible.
If you look at this differently, think about surveys as „products” we are trying to „sell” to demanding „customers”, Gen Z in our case. And, as I said before, if you satisfy the most demanding „customers”, other „customers” will follow in droves and you’ll have all the quality data you can ask for.
And in the end, that’s what you need, right?