Gen Z, or the post-millennials, are the cool kids born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s (for more information about the characteristics of different generations, see our earlier blog article FieldworkHub’s 2-minute guide to post-war generations).
There are well over one billion Gen Zs in the world and they are starting to hold considerable purchasing power. These digital natives are hypercognitive and unafraid to voice their opinions. It’s no wonder many brands we collaborate with are eager to understand their psyche and what influences their decisions.
A common question we receive from clients is, “How can we recruit and engage Gen Z to gain better insights?” At FieldworkHub, we’ve developed a four-step approach to ensure the success of our Gen Z-focused studies.
To recruit high-quality respondents, we’ve learned the importance of investing time to understand our target audience. Gen Z defies being boxed into a single category, so we take the time to grasp their unique attributes (it certainly helps that a number of our team members are themselves members of Gen Z!). By personalising our approach and recruitment strategy, we can tap into our extensive panel, or leverage social media platforms and student bulletin boards, and even make use of peer-to-peer referrals. Referrals work wonders with such a social generation.
At FieldworkHub, we carefully craft our introductory and screener language to connect with Gen Z. We’ve discovered what resonates with this age group by ditching formal and traditional terminology. Instead, we adopt their abbreviations and slang. We ensure our approach is visually engaging and stands out from the crowd to capture their attention amid the content overload they face.
While it’s essential to incentivise respondents for their time, we’ve found that Gen Z values having their voices heard over the material value of the incentive. We ensure the research objectives are clear so respondents understand why we’re asking them to give up some of their time. We also emphasise the positive benefits of their involvement, to try to make them feel genuinely valued.
With great power comes great responsibility, and at FieldworkHub, we take our duty of care to respondents seriously. Gen Z includes children, students, and young adults in the early stages of their careers. When recruiting, we take extra precautions, especially with children. We obtain parental consent and ensure the child also willingly participates in the research, strongly emphasising ethics and consent.
