The speed of change splintered Gen Z into micro-generations

It made sense 50 years ago to market to entire generations as if they were one persona. It was a way for companies to understand consumers when there was little else to go on.

But does this approach still work today?

In the 1960s, marketers needed to reach the large cohort of post-war consumers entering adulthood (and peak spending years). Et voilà, the idea of the Baby Boomer generation was born. The conventional wisdom was that the entire cohort had lived through similar experiences that shaped their values and spending patterns similarly.

It was largely true at the time, but a lot has changed since then. Technological progress was impressive, but it didn’t happen at today’s pace, and change took longer to propagate through the consumer world.

We also have a lot more tools now, giving us more granular views of consumers: behavioral segmentations, psychological profiling, CRM databases, hyper-personalization, and algorithms.

All this considered, it just doesn’t make sense to pack consumers into cohorts built around 15- to 25-year birth ranges. Especially given the way AI is transforming how we interact with the world every few months.

SAME GENERATION, DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE

Consider a Gen Z consumer who was in their mid-to-late teens from 2020 to 2022. They were gearing up to make connections, start driving, establish an identity independent from their family, and clarify their place in the world. COVID-19 completely upended that formative period. Their worldview, perhaps characterized by anger or resentment, might be wildly different than that of a younger sibling just finishing elementary school—and for whom the extended time at home with their parents was comforting and reassuring.

Both siblings are part of the same generation but likely have very different worldviews—each part of a different micro-generation.

They know they’re wildly different from each other. And marketers are finally catching on. We’re already seeing a lot of new labels as market researchers find ways to get more granular: Geriatric millennials, Xennials, Zillennials, Generation Alphas, Zalphas, Generation Jones, the digital generation, the pandemic generation—and that cohort that came of age between 2020-2022 that I like to call Covidians, shaped by a lockdown and a lack of human-to-human interaction, right when they needed it the most.

These micro-generations are an attempt to drill down into the decades that define individuals, because culture, technology, trends—and people—change too quickly for their existence to be represented by a decades-long generation.

A FEW YEARS, A BIG DIFFERENCE

One way we can better understand individual consumers is to examine their lived experiences—including the cultural, social, and economic factors that affect them.

Millennials, some entering the workforce before the 2008 financial crisis, some after, faced very different situations. Some began and maintained successful career momentum; others lived with their parents until they were 30. Giving the credit or blame for these behaviors to being born between 1981 and 1996 doesn’t make sense.

Harvard professor Louis Menand calls this approach “astrology,” saying, “You are ascribing to birth dates what is really the result of changing conditions.” He also denies that there is a shared cultural identity driving behavior; it has more to do with real-world factors, like business cycles. The point being, members of generations aren’t all the same. This is true economically, culturally, and politically. There are vast splits in worldviews even among groups that we sometimes imagine to be homogeneous.

You can see this in Generation Z Ivy League college students, for example, who found themselves bifurcated and even radicalized by their experiences in the pandemic: In the spring of 2024, The President trailed Biden by 26 points among 25- to 29-year-olds—but by only 14 points among 18- to 24-year-olds, according to the Harvard Youth Poll. Being just a handful of years apart meant these students had, on average, very different worldviews and priorities.

The takeaway? They’re called “Zoomers” for a reason—they’re moving and differentiating fast. Just a few years can make a huge difference in how Gen Z perceives and reacts to their world; missing the mark with your messaging can get you called “cringe”—a hard label to lose.

THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY

Consider: the number of households with personal computers only broke 50% about 25 years ago—decades after the PC was invented. But it only took about five years for smartphones to cross the same threshold. Technology is evolving more quickly, and it’s being adopted more rapidly. This results in faster, more frequent changes to how tech affects each emerging cohort of users—and how these users, through the adoption of feedback loops, can shape technology’s use cases as they emerge.

In the wake of this rapid change, adjacent generations find themselves positioned very differently within the tech landscape. Some are PC-native while others are born with smartphones in their hands. The nascent Generation Beta is being born into the world of AI, while the rest of us are figuring out how to adapt to it.

THE CHALLENGE

The challenge for marketers, innovators, designers, and market researchers is to realign their segmentation approach, moving from 20-year generational cohorts to smaller, more targeted micro-generations of three, five, or seven years. This would better align with the pace of these consumers’ lived experiences—and serve as a more useful marker for developing messaging, products, and experiences that speak to these micro-generations. It’s how we’ll avoid becoming “cringe.”

Consumers are already demanding this of marketers: precise, timely messages and products that speak to them, in the moment, by understanding the zeitgeist and the exact needs of their micro-generation.

Covidians who came of age from 2020 to 2022 represent a unique challenge and opportunity for marketers in this increasingly fragmented, fast-moving world.

Oscar Yuan is the chief strategy and growth officer at Material.

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