How Brands Can Balance Trust with Trends to Build Authenticity with Gen Z
Gen Z is difficult to put in a box, and that’s exactly the point.
This generation is not only diverse in terms of demographics, but also in interests, identities, communities, influences and forms of self-expression. At the same time, Gen Z is entering adulthood amid economic uncertainty, social change and an overwhelming volume of information.
For marketers, that creates a challenge: How can brands participate in the trends and cultural moments that matter to Gen Z without feeling forced, opportunistic or out of touch?
Collage’s research points to an important answer. Brands need to understand the deeper cultural traits driving Gen Z behavior before jumping into the trends those behaviors produce.
Three traits in particular help explain how Gen Z navigates culture: Pressured, Game-Changing and Collective Individualism. Together, they offer marketers a framework for building trust, understanding emerging subcultures and participating in culture more authentically.
Gen Z is looking for the “right” answer and feeling the pressure
Gen Z came of age with a vast digital and information infrastructure already in place.
Unlike Millennials, who experienced the initial rise of many digital platforms and learned to adapt to them, Gen Z grew up with infrastructure already in place and expected information to be immediately accessible. In theory, that means they can research the right school, career, city, relationship, product or path through life.
In practice, unlimited information can create unlimited pressure.
The expectation that there is a “best” answer, and that enough research should reveal it, can lead to constant anxiety about making the right choice.
For brands, that means simply adding more information to an already crowded environment isn’t necessarily helpful. Brands need to understand the pressure Gen Z consumers are experiencing and make their interactions useful, intuitive and worthy of attention.
Gen Z expects to have a voice in change
Gen Z also sees major problems in the world around them and often feels a responsibility to address them.
Climate change is one prominent example. Many members of Gen Z believe previous generations did not do enough to solve the problem and that responsibility for creating change now falls partly on their shoulders.
That contributes to Gen Z’s reputation as a comparatively serious generation at a young age. They’ve grown up amid conversations about climate, social justice, the economy, reproductive rights and other consequential issues while simultaneously navigating milestones like school, first jobs and early adulthood.
They don’t just want to observe the world. They expect their voices to matter within it.
Collective individualism is reshaping how Gen Z connects
One of the most useful traits for marketers to understand is the generation’s Collective Individualism.
It sounds contradictory, but that tension captures something fundamental about Gen Z: individuality and belonging don’t have to compete.
Members of Gen Z can bring different identities, backgrounds, styles, interests and experiences to the same community. In fact, those differences can become part of what connects them.
Collage’s research illustrates the strength of this mindset. Eighty percent of Gen Z consumers say they enjoy taking in opinions and experiences different from their own. Nearly three-quarters say they are proud of the things that make them different from other people and 70% say they like to express themselves through style, creativity or other forms of self-expression.
That openness creates a cultural cycle: Gen Z discovers ideas from a wide variety of sources, interprets those ideas through an individual lens and then expresses the result outwardly.
For marketers, this helps explain why Gen Z culture can appear to move so quickly, and why broad assumptions about what “Gen Z likes” often miss the mark.
The rise of subcultures gives brands a new way to think about community
Rather than belonging exclusively to large, monolithic cultural groups, Gen Z consumers increasingly find community through shared interests.
70% of Gen Z consumers say they are looking to connect with people who have similar interests. Those connections can happen offline, but digital platforms make it possible for highly specific communities to form around virtually any passion, identity or combination of the two.
That creates an enormous spectrum of cultural specificity.
Livestreaming is one manifestation of this behavior. 70% of Gen Z watches livestreams on platforms such as YouTube or TikTok.
The appeal isn’t simply the content itself. A livestream can combine a trusted creator, a shared interest and a community of people interacting in real time. It’s unpredictable, participatory and relatively unpolished.
In other words, it feels alive.
And because the experience is being created in the moment, watching a recording later isn’t quite the same as participating while it happens.
Cultural specificity is an advantage, not an obstacle
Gen Z’s appetite for discovery also changes the conventional wisdom about what makes content accessible.
Language offers a useful example. Content in another language once presented a significant barrier: If audiences couldn’t understand every word, marketers could assume they wouldn’t engage.
Today, cultural specificity itself can be part of the attraction.
Global artists and entertainment demonstrate how audiences can embrace content rooted in a particular language or cultural context rather than requiring that content to become more generic first.
For brands, the implication is significant: Making culture broader does not necessarily make it more appealing.
Sometimes specificity is what makes something worth discovering.
Don’t invade subcultures. Co-create with them.
Recognizing the power of subcultures doesn’t mean brands should immediately jump into them.
In fact, entering a community without credibility can produce exactly the reaction marketers hope to avoid: the brand feels forced, awkward or “cringe.”
A better model is co-creation.
For example, a Staples employee created social content about the retailer’s products and services in their own distinctive voice. On paper, the content communicated straightforward product information. But the delivery transformed it.
It felt spontaneous. Personal. Unscripted.
The creator wasn’t attempting to mimic the language of a community from the outside. They were communicating naturally from within their own voice and style.
For brands, that’s an important distinction.
Authenticity doesn’t necessarily come from writing a better script for a creator. Sometimes it comes from giving the creator less of a script.
Emotion is becoming an attention strategy
These dynamics become particularly powerful in audio.
For Gen Z, listening can be an intensely personal experience—a way to escape, regulate emotions, process experiences and create an individual space even while surrounded by other people.
78% of Gen Z turns to content that speaks to them emotionally.
That insight informed what SiriusXM describes as “Feelcore”: a broader trend in which emotional resonance helps determine what earns Gen Z’s attention.
Feelcore isn’t limited to one emotion. It can include calm and soft optimism, melancholy, vulnerability, suspense, empowerment or intensity.
The common denominator is not whether the feeling is positive or negative. It’s whether the feeling is genuine enough to create connection.
That distinction matters for marketers. Brands often gravitate toward positivity, but Gen Z doesn’t necessarily expect every experience to be relentlessly upbeat. Melancholy, for example, can provide a way to process emotion rather than simply dwell on sadness. Confessional podcasts can create intimacy through vulnerability. True crime and other immersive formats can offer suspense within a controlled listening environment.
The opportunity isn’t to manufacture an emotion. It’s to understand the emotional role that a particular experience already plays in consumers’ lives.
Four principles for engaging Gen Z more effectively
Here are 4 principles brands can use when translating cultural understanding into action to engage Gen Z more effectively.
- Start with the emotional consumer need
- Look beyond the trend itself to understand what audiences are getting from it. Is it comfort? Escape? Belonging? Empowerment? Vulnerability? Excitement? The underlying emotional need is often more durable than the trend expressing it.
- Invest in the spaces and creators where culture is already happening.
- Creators understand their communities because they participate in them. Give them room to interpret the brand rather than forcing them into conventional brand language.
- Be an emotional co-pilot, not the main character.
- Brands don’t always need to own the stage. In many cultural moments, the more credible role is to enable, support or enhance an experience consumers already value.
- Test, learn and iterate.
- Trends move quickly, and cultural communities respond differently. Rather than assuming one execution will work everywhere, marketers should test ideas with specific audiences, learn from the response and adapt.
To keep up with Gen Z, understand what sits beneath the trend
The temptation for marketers is to focus on whatever is trending right now.
But by the time a trend becomes obvious enough for every brand to notice, simply participating in it may not be enough.
A stronger approach begins one layer deeper.
Understand why Gen Z seeks out different perspectives. Understand why individuality and community coexist. Understand why emotionally resonant content commands attention. Understand why creators and highly specific communities can carry more credibility than polished brand communications.
Then use trends as expressions of those deeper motivations, not substitutes for understanding them.
For brands, keeping pace with Gen Z isn’t about predicting every cultural moment or adopting every new piece of internet language.
It’s about earning enough trust to participate when the right moment arrives.
And sometimes, the most culturally fluent thing a brand can do is give the people already shaping that culture the space to lead.
Ready to turn cultural understanding into lasting brand impact? Connect with us today.