How to make your brand relevant for products that Gen Z is yet to purchase.

What if you could find your perfect future customer before they purchased your product for the very first time? Know how they talk, what they believe, and what turns them away?  How many marketing dollars could this knowledge save? 

If this sounds like a song of the future, I don’t blame you for being skeptical. But the reality is that advances in market research technology make it possible for brands to find their future customers before they even know they are on the market. Here’s how: 

1. Use intelligent market research techniques – such as AI surveys – to blueprint your ideal future customer to uncover the who, what, how, and why.  

1. Train a lookalike model based on that blueprint to find real people who match the demographics, attitudes, and behaviors and more. 

1. Build tailored outreach campaigns to those specific customer profiles and engage with them at the right time.  

To showcase this approach, we have recently partnered with RevOptimal, an exciting technology startup built by veterans from the market research industry. In our recent case study, we reached a sample of 300 Gen Z-ers who are about to make the biggest move of their lives: move out of their parents’ homes and finally live on their own. As they face doing their first load of laundry all by themselves and discover that the kitchen sink doesn’t actually clean itself, we wondered what brands of home care products they might be reaching for.  

In our study, we learned a few things about how Gen Z think about certain product categories and found out about their attitudes towards different brands of detergent, dishwashing soap, etc. We found that Gen Z definitely have opinions about the brands of products they have yet to purchase. They have their clear favorites, often the same brands their parents used. More than 20% identified brands they would NOT purchase for various reasons, such as toxic ingredients. Meanwhile, others confuse products such as Dawn for Downy. (Don’t worry, they are still learning!) 

Additionally, we uncovered that while there is a wide variety of retailers where they would purchase home care products from, Gen Z prefer discount stores like Dollar Tree, big retailers like Walmart, and home stores like HomeGoods. 

There is clearly a lot of work brands need to do to make these consumers reach for their home care product with confidence. The good news is that we know how to find them. Even with the limited scope of our case study, we can map our Gen Z respondents onto a database of millions of other Gen Z shoppers in the United States and find, for example, 300,000+ future Lysol buyers and almost 500,000 new Tide users.  

The power to pinpoint your future brand influencers has never been this close to your fingertips. However, the competition for the new consumer generation is stiff, and deploying new technologies to find them is fundamental to any brand’s future economic success.  

About RevOptimal:

Audience intelligence at scale. The data fabric for customer-driven Insight, Media, and Advertising teams, RevOptimal’s audience intelligence platform seamlessly maximizes research and activation spend.

About GroupSolver:

GroupSolver is an intelligent research platform that helps brands and organizations ease the stress of research and data analysis. Through its proprietary AI technology and robust quantitative methodologies, GroupSolver allows researchers to efficiently quantify the qualitative and quickly gather insights tailored for their business needs when they need it. From concept testing and brand perception to customer and employee experience, GroupSolver has the technology and analytical expertise to confidently answer the question of “Why?“.