Generation Z – Bulbshare resources

Michael Wylie-Harris In Advertising, Brands, Bulbshare blog, Trends

Marketing’s next frontier: Why up to 80% of consumers are embracing the great outdoors

The outdoors has never been more ‘in’. Recent years have seen a range of once niche pastimes hit the mainstream, with outdoorsy brands like Patagonia and The North Face enjoying a whole new cachet as the masses look to show off their rugged credentials.

From wild swimming, camping and kayaking to bouldering, trekking and climbing – everybody’s at it. If someone told you ten years ago that two of the hottest labels on the high street would be climbing brands, would you have believed them? It used to be only geography teachers wore ‘outbound clothing’, now it’s fashionistas, rappers and popstars.

So, what’s prompted the shift? Why are more and more people jumping on the outbound bandwagon? And what is it about the last decade that’s made people go ‘wild’ for the great outdoors?

We asked our global community why it’s more important than ever to connect with nature and spend time in the outdoors. The answer is overwhelmingly about mental health and wellness – and it’s a reaction to anxieties surrounding social media, technology and the digital age. Your North Face puffa might be bang on trend – but it’s also about what it represents: freedom, escape, physical endeavour, the big, wide world. The antithesis of what for many are the trappings of modern technology.

Outbound boom
The Association of British Climbing Walls (ABC) tells us numbers of climbers are growing by 20% year-on-year. While the Outdoor Swimming Society saw numbers grow to 70,000 in 2019, compared with just a few hundred ten years before. Our global community is part of this trend. 78% of our Bulbsharers now go on holidays that are based around outbound pursuits and 40% do outdoorsy activities once a week or more. When asked about the types of things they get involved in, hiking, camping, cycling, wild swimming and fishing come out on top.

The motives
97% of our community say connecting with nature can help with their mental health. But even before we directly asked that question, an overwhelming majority mentioned it when talking about their love of the outdoors – drawing associations with positivity, calmness, self-esteem and beating anxiety. And just as our community associates the outdoors with positive mental health, they blame social media for those anxieties they need to escape. 89% of our users said connecting with nature is more important in the age of social media, and in our open text responses, social media and technology loom large in our word cloud.

Return to the source
What we are seeing is a mass reaction to the pressure of social media and the trappings of modern technology. As people’s lives are increasingly being made more tracked, more monitored, more digital, nature offers the exact opposite – freedom, calmness, release.

The great outdoors then, can be seen as a new frontier for brand marketing, messaging and positioning. Brands should be aware of the new role nature has to offer in the lives of consumers – as well as their concerns about technology and the impact of mental health. It’s time to bake ‘the great outdoors’ into campaigns, competitions, and content. Wild swimming and outbound holidays are no longer the preserve of a niche, ‘intrepid’ crowd – they have mainstream relevance and mass appeal.

Key Quotes
“(Spending time in the outdoors) is paramount for our mental and physical health. Whenever I am struggling, a walk is the perfect way to clear my head…” (Bulbshare user, 29, UK)

“I like to get outside… It’s nice to get a chance to disconnect from devices and get a bit of sun.” (Bulbshare user, 37, Australia)

“In this day and age of people with eyes always glued to a screen, it is important to get outside and look around. To get the wind in your hair and the sun on your face is a great way to relax and recharge.” (Bulbshare user, 66, UK)

“It is a soothing mechanism to be able to connect with nature – I find it calming and relaxing for both my peace of mind and my relationship with others.” (Bulbshare user, 43, Toronto)

“Because only when I have close contact with nature, I feel that everything is possible…” (Bulbshare user, 28, Poland)

“We all know that nature gives us peace and health. Outdoor activities make us feel calm and relaxed and can ease tension and depression.” (Bulbshare user, 18, Malaysia)

“Social media is exhausting for our brains – unlike anything that has come before…” (Bulbshare user, 30, Poland)

Key take-outs

Our global community is committed to outdoor pursuits: From hiking and trekking to climbing and bouldering, the great outdoors is seriously in vogue.
Positive mental health: The outdoors is seen as an escape from technology and social media and the assault on mental health that these represent. Outdoorsy messaging should be framed around positivity, calmness and escape.
Bake ‘the great outdoors’ into campaigns, competitions, and content. Wild swimming and outbound holidays are no longer the preserve of the niche, ‘intrepid’ crowd – they have mainstream relevance and mass appeal..

To find out how Bulbshare could benefit your organisation, please contact Michael Wylie-Harris on michael@bulbshare.com

Tom Kenyon In Bulbshare blog, Youth

Do you really know how to connect to Gen Z? 4 steps to true social listening

Gen Z spend their lives on social networks, right? Therefore, it follows that ‘social media listening’ is the best way to find out about their lives, interests and aspirations – unmediated and in their own words. But that’s not what we’ve observed. Social listening can tell you about brand mentions and offer some limited sentiment analysis, but on any subject outside the brand world, the insights are severely limited.

Research conducted with our global community in 2019 tells us that social media platforms are the not the environments to get a candid view of how young people think. While Gen Z will share and like content within their filter bubble, everything they do is strictly guided by what they want their ‘public persona’ to project. They don’t hold meaningful conversations on public platforms – and rarely give an entirely open view of how they actually think or behave.

Social listening means brands end up monitoring a carefully curated point of view – it’s like eavesdropping an interview, or a constructed reality. Look at the top social networks for Generation Z: Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter. Instagram is a stage. It’s for following people and curating a personal brand. For most of the young people in our global community, this makes it a passive network. Gen Z don’t post anything that is ‘off brand’ on their Instagram.

Facebook is still widely used, but it’s for news content and video discovery. Young people are more comfortable sharing content than posting status updates and comments. Gen Z know their parents are on Facebook and keep things strictly PG. Twitter is seen, at best, as a real-time news feed and at worst, confusing, insular and cliquey. That means that all the meaningful conversations, questions and recommendations between friends (where the real insight is) happen in private groups. Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger. So, how do you get the insight that young people share in their private conversations?

A targeted approach – in a ‘safe’ environment
A private, ‘safe’ space that replicates the social media environment – with all the positive associations of a community – but allows for direct, private feedback is the only way to get true insight. Creating the conditions for young people to talk in person is the best way to facilitate real ‘social listening’ – using the conventions of social media that Gen Z have grown up with and curating dedicated digital communities to discuss and create, away from their carefully managed social media identities, or the prying ears of parents or teachers.

In short, social listening projects are often mining for insight in barren land. The best way to listen to the candid conversations of Gen Z is to cultivate the conditions for them to occur within your earshot. At Bulbshare, we do exactly this: provide an intuitive interface that replicates social media platforms, while also allowing for confidential, one-to-one feedback. Check out our toolkit for how to engage Gen Z for true social listening.

Four steps for true social listening:

Don’t trust ‘social’ when connecting to Gen Z. Young people don’t speak candidly on the social media platforms you know. Everything they share is subject to a carefully curated public persona.
Build your own communities. Going direct is the only way for authentic, unguarded interactions. Private, owned communities allow for direct feedback in a trusted environment.
Engage with the right conversations. At Bulbshare we ask the right questions to ensure we’re engaging our youth communities in meaningful conversations – in order to guarantee feedback, ideas and content that work for our clients..
See how we connected the skincare brand Simple to 1,000 Gen Z consumers across the UK and the US to inform a social purpose campaign that would resonate with young audiences. Click here.