Brands Are Chasing Young Buyers – But Lazy Assumptions Appropriate Culture and Sabotage Strategy
“Brands need to think from the perspective [of] what a young person actually means when they say those things."
In a digital age in which young people are often labelled “lazy” or “self-obsessed,” brands eager to resonate with them risk backfiring by relying on stereotypes, says brand strategy consultant Eugene Healy.
Speaking to marketers and brand consultants at Unmade’s Unlock conference in Sydney yesterday, Eugene stressed that marketing which co-opts youth culture for relevance often fails to grasp its real drivers, and misses out on genuine engagement.
“The bigger the brands, the more poorly understood young people are,” Eugene said.
He warns that brands frequently fall into the trap of outdated myths, which cloud the way young people are viewed.
The stereotypes are familiar: young people are “lazy, self-obsessed, entitled, and glued to their phones.” These generalisations, Eugene argued, only serve to obscure an already complex demographic, leaving brands with a one-dimensional, inaccurate understanding.
"I see these rubbish tendencies everywhere across brands today,” Eugene said, who has held brand strategy roles at The Contenders and PUSH Collective, and previously lectured at Melbourne Business School.
“Brands know young people want a brand that is socially conscious, authentic, inclusive, personalised, or digital-first. I’m not saying that any of these things are fundamentally untrue, but I think they’re often understood as heuristics – at a very, very surface level.
“Brands need to think from the perspective [of] what a young person actually means when they say those things."
Eugene noted the irony that brands simultaneously label young people as “addicts” while designing digital products specifically to monopolise and steal “every fraction” of audience attention.
The world young people inhabit today is unrecognisable compared to the one millennials knew just two decades ago, Eugene said, noting that Gen Z is rapidly developing new “frameworks for success,” informing attitudes and values in ways that make them difficult to map with traditional assumptions.
"Millennials were alive to witness the setting sun of the golden age of capitalism,” Eugene said.
“Some were able to abscond with enormous wealth because of the tech boom and by making smart investments here and there. Gen Z is a culture that has emerged entirely after that situation – the sun has well and truly set.
“It doesn't matter how hard you work or whether you have that prestigious degree – there’s no guarantee that you’ll make it to the top. The likelihood is that you might end up somewhere slightly below the middle.
“What has this created in terms of work culture? In this environment, hard, conventional work and traditional careers are essentially an expressway straight into struggle.
“They are setting new goals outside the traditional framework of success, because that traditional framework of success was taken away.”
According to Eugene, there’s a complex bifurcation of cultural attitudes in young people today.
They might embrace trends like “lazy girl jobs” and “quiet quitting,” but these go hand in hand with “side-hustles” and an entrepreneurial spirit that challenges the lazy label.
Young people are crafting their own metrics for success, he said, rejecting outdated values in favour of approaches that prioritise self-agency and resilience.
Brands, however, often attempt to engage with young audiences by appropriating the surface of youth culture to acquire its “cultural capital” and to boost their own relevance.
This, Eugene asserted, is a flawed approach, based on weak assumptions rather than an authentic understanding of youth experiences.
“[Youth culture] is a response mechanism to the overwhelming cultural, political, economic and technological forces that are exerted upon [young people],” Eugene explained.
“It's a response to a broken social contract around hard work and the promise of upward mobility that comes with that.
He pointed to the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad fiasco as an example of what can happen when brands attempt to co-opt youth culture without respect or understanding.
“Weak assumptions lead to weak stereotypes lead to weak strategy leads to Kendall Jenner Pepsi ads.”
“We want our brands to show up as authentic and socially conscious, and Pepsi completely failed to understand what this rebellion is in response to.”
Eugene Healy speaking at Unmade’s Unlock conference in Sydney.
Brand messaging built on shallow assumptions has left brands vulnerable to criticism, often creating moments of cultural dissonance rather than connection, Eugene explained.
“If you are going to appropriate that economic capital for personal gain, you have a responsibility to authentically represent that culture.”
The misunderstanding of young people, Eugene suggests, often comes from an outdated understanding of what youth culture itself is, and shapes assumptions about social media.
“People actually still misunderstand what social media is,” Eugene said.
“People again lean on the really banal heuristic of, ‘it causes you to compare yourself to other people’.
“The real effect of social media is that it's a dissociator, it causes you to see yourself in the third person, to observe yourself from the perspective of the person that's viewing you.
“That is effectively the process of learning to manage your own identity like it's a brand.
“Having that perspective in your head is a better way of looking at what the scenario is actually like.”
The flow of information is constant and relentless on social platforms. The result is an exhausting social climate for young people, and brands must recognise that engaging them requires an approach that addresses, rather than exploits, these challenges
One possible route is for marketers to consult with young people directly in their workplaces.
However, Eugene noted, this too can be problematic if brands fail to dig deeper than surface-level engagement, and a commitment to understanding what youth culture is responding to would serve brands better than tokenistic efforts.
To truly resonate, brands need to be better at understanding their audiences, and prioritise building brands in the real world, in genuine ways that connect rather than simply appropriate.
Eugene pointed to Miu Miu, for instance, which appeals to young people through its focus on slowness and delayed gratification, fostering an appreciation for quality over quantity.
Brands that avoid stereotypes, listen to young voices, and adapt to the values of today’s youth are those poised to make meaningful, lasting connections in an age where attention is scarce but genuine engagement is priceless.
