The Marketing Playbook for the Next Generation of Consumers.

Generational marketing advice is mostly astrology for budgets. But there are two real, measurable shifts in how people under thirty buy, and neither is about which platform they are on.

They are about who is trusted, and how a decision gets made.

The brand is no longer the source

The product page is the last stop, not the first. The decision has already been made in a comment thread, a group chat, a review video or a forum post — none of which you control and all of which you can participate in honestly. Being absent from those places is a decision too.

Consistency reads as honesty

A brand that says the same thing on its careers page, its packaging and its support replies is believed. One that has a different voice per channel reads as managed, and managed reads as concealing something. This is not a tone-of-voice problem; it is an operations one.

• Show the price early, including the parts that are awkward
• Answer the bad review in public, without a template
• Let the people who make the product talk about it
• Publish the trade-offs; every product has them

What has not changed

A good product, a fair price and a returns policy that does not punish the customer still outperform every content strategy in this article. Younger buyers are not more cynical, they are better informed, and better-informed buyers reward the same things they always did — faster.

The playbook is mostly: be worth recommending, then be easy to recommend.