Millennial pink is a thing of the past with Gen Y aesthetics. The brands are focused on Gen Z and are trying to impose yellow on young buzzers as a symbol of their hope for the future. We will tell you why the marketing strategy did not work and the young people did not accept the imposed attitudes
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Pink for millennials
Millennial pink has been ubiquitous long before the Pantone Color Institute christened it the color of the year in 2016 (albeit calling it Rose Quartz). In the same year, the word “millennial” was added to the name, which led to a marketing frenzy.
Why do people love pink so much? Anja Herlbert, professor of visual neuroscience at Newcastle University, suggests that love for him dates back to prehistoric times. While gathering, people focused on red berries and fruits – delicious and ripe. If you remove the saturation, you get a soft pink. So Hurlbert explains why women like the color (they were the ones who collected in prehistoric times), but this logic also applies to men. One way or another, the human eye perceives the soft pink color as pleasant and not annoying. He was around almost always – in the outfits of Mamie Eisenhower (former first lady of the United States. – Forbes Life), Paris Hilton’s Juicy Couture plush suits, office clerk shirts on Fridays, in the gradient of the sunset sky, on the counters of pastry shops. It was just that there was no concentrated interest in him until a certain point.
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“The combined shades of” rose quartz “and” serenity “(a soft blue tint. – Forbes Life ) demonstrate a balance between a warm pink tone and a cool blue” – this is how Pantone explained their choice of color of the year in 2016 and noted what they wanted this show the blurring of gender boundaries taking place in the Western world.
Late millennials (those under 30) were the first generation to see the renewed struggle for gender equality – what is called the “new ethics”. And pink, which has long been associated with something feminine, has received new meanings. First wave feminists disliked this color for its gender coloration, but modern activists saw a challenge in it.
After adding two factors – pleasing to the eye color and actual subtext – “millennial pink” was obtained. In recent years, there has been nowhere to hide from him, as companies broadcasting modern values have taken color into circulation. The most striking example is the beauty brand Glossier, whose aesthetics are still openly inspired by every fifth brand of cosmetics. Millennial pink boosted sales for everything it applied to. – clothes, interior items, furniture. Even Instagram posts looked better in pink.
Branding and communications specialist Katie Smith analyzed the collections and financial statements of eight brands of clothing popular with millennials in 2017, including Topshop, Urban Outfitters, Forever 21 and ASOS. Smith found that the number of pink clothes in mass-market collections increased by 9.4%, and in the premium market by 1%. She also noted an increase in sales of pink in both categories – by 12.7% and 16.5%, respectively.
A new color for Gen Z
While the fashion and beauty industries conquered millennials, grew up, which means they became solvent, buzzers are representatives of Gen Z. Continuing the tradition of assigning shades to each generation, yellow was declared the favorite color of buzzers, but they did not seem to buy it.
The color yellow was supposed to represent an optimistic outlook on the future that the new generation is creating. “Yellow is the color that best represents hope, optimism and joy. It’s a universal symbol for sunlight and warmth, explains Leatrice Eisman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute for Refinery29. “These characteristics make it a symbolic representation of what Gen Z is looking for – new hope for the future and energy to achieve their goals.”
At a certain point, the yellow really became more – this is noticeable in the films “La La Land” and “Beauty and the Beast”, in the clips of Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Drake’s In My Feelings. Without saying a word, fashion magazines began to publish collections of yellow things that should certainly appear in wardrobes. The zumerian yellow craze peaked in the summer of 2018, and sales picked up again in the wake of discussions.
So the customers of the Danish brand Ganni in 2018 bought 150% more yellow clothes than usual, and the press office of Net-a-Porter said that sales of yellow clothes increased by 30% (how many buzzers were among the happy buyers of dresses and trousers, not reported). The results are impressive, but in 2021, few people remember about “Jenzer yellow”, while the definition of “millennial” was firmly established for the pale pink color.
Why “zoomer yellow” is not the new pink
The Austrian-German sociologist Karl Mannheim was the first to formulate the idea of generations – in his 1952 article he wrote that each generation defines society for 15-20 years, and then is replaced by a new one. This process is happening right now – millennials are replaced by grown-up buzzers. They grow up, graduate from universities, vote in elections, and shop a lot. Sociologists segment each generation with a list of expectations, attitudes, habits, and values that are specific to their representatives. Millennials in this sense are already “learned material.” Their behavior as consumers has long been known – it is easy for brands to target Generation Y. Zoomers, in turn, remain a mystery, which is very much to be solved.
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Ekaterina Shulman , a political scientist and associate professor at the Institute of Social Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, notes that it is rather strange to switch all attention to each new generation, as if the old one has already died. “Those who are 40 today will be active and influential for another 30 years, and this should be taken into account” – this is how Shulman spoke about generation X (people born from 1965 to 1980 – Forbes Life ), but to the confrontation between buzzers and millennials this also applies. The world after digital evolution and subsequent globalization has accelerated significantly, which Mannheim could not foresee in the 1950s.
One of the critics of generational theory, Neeraj Dawar, professor of marketing at the Richard Ivey School of Business, writes : “Dividing consumers into generations based on their year of birth is one of the most primitive forms of segmentation. Today, with the widespread use of smartphones, these methods seem as outdated as dialing a telephone. ”
Late millennials and early zoomers have much more in common than past generations. They use the same social networks, go to the same establishments and shop where it is fashionable, convenient and affordable. Unlike millennials, buzzers are more likely to visit offline stores, although they initially learn about a product via the Internet. The artificially created excitement around yellow was supposed to bring them to stores (even if millennials were already tired of these games with the “color of the generation”), but “yellow zoomer” did not become the new pink.
According to experts of the McKinsey consulting company, consumption for genzers is an expression of their individuality, and their priorities are the exclusivity and ethics of the product. “This generation is just eager to explore and find something new,” Bloomberg quoted Zhang Xiaobo, chief executive officer of smart TV development at Chinese company iQiyi. The younger generation loves to discover new small brands, rather than becoming clients of large international companies. Buzzers also do not consider it shameful to buy things in second-hand shops or on resale platforms.
It is not enough just to declare yellow (or any other color) fashionable. First, such a straightforward approach may not work for audiences whose representatives want to “be different”. Secondly, the buzzers will go shopping not only at ASOS, but also in a small store in the creative cluster that will definitely not provide reports on the sale of yellow tees. And most importantly, Generation Z has its own trends, which are chaotically born on the Internet and have time to get bored before the big market players work out them.
New subcultures and love for retro
Being predominantly still young, the Zoomers as a socio-demographic group are visually very fragmented – such a variety of subcultures, it seems, could not be distinguished either in the 80s or in the 2000s. For example, you can take apart TikTok – the main zoomer social network today. E-girls, Soft-boys, Witchtok – the visual codes of these and other communities define fashion for young people. Some of them have appeared recently, but are inspired by the past. These are, for example, modern “bimbo”, whose style has become an homage to the glamor of the 2000s. Zoomers love different things, but they are united by nostalgia for the times in which they did not live or were too small to remember.
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Singer and this year’s Grammy winner Dua Lipa is a perfect example. Her images, inspired by pop singers of the 2000s, are repeated by Anastasia Ivleeva and numerous female fans aged 13 and older. The joint video of Doja Cat performers, Ariana Grande and Megan Thee Stallion for the song “34 + 35” looks like it was shot 20 years ago, and Miley Cyrus returned the popularity of the mullet – a haircut from the 80s, which seemed to be doomed to oblivion. These girls are millennials, but the audience they work for is genzers.
Where did this love of retro come from? Young people simply do not want to continue the trend towards minimalism started by millennials. Normcore (the tendency to “look normal.” – Forbes Life ), which has become a symbol of the “right” taste and “intellectual” fashion of the 2010s, has given way to bright colors and sparkles. This is not to say that buzzers love something specific – their difference from the rest will better explain the division by age than the theory of generations. To get buzzers interested and sell them a product, it’s best to follow their social media subscriptions and give them more opportunities to express their personality.
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
Millions in 20s: Ranking of the Highest Paid Tiktokers
1 out of 10
No. 10. Diana Astaire
Number of subscribers: 6.5 million
Age: 20 years old
Доход в TikTok: 1,44 млн
Как и Анна Покров, Диана Астер — участница тикток дома Dream Team House. Настоящее имя девушки — Диана Дмитриева. Родилась и выросла Диана в Ростове, а после выпуска из школы поступила в Российский экономический университет им. Плеханова.
Популярность на TikTok Диане принесли совместные видео с другим блогером — Ксенией Карповой. Первое совместное видео девушек набрало 4 млн просмотров, а второе уже 8 млн. В 2018 году девушка снялась в социальном ролике, призывающем чаще звонить матерям.
In 2020, like many bloggers on TikTok, Asta decided to start a music career and recorded the song Barbie. TikTok users have already shot 69.2 thousand clips for it. And the official video for the song on YouTube gained 4.5 million views. The idea to record your own song was born after other bloggers from Dream Team House started recording music. In an interview with Glamor, Astaire admitted that she dreams of recording a duet with Elj or Yegor Creed. Aster’s advertisers include Sberbank, Garnier and others.
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1 out of 10
No. 1. Rakhim Abramov
Number of subscribers: 9.5 million
Age: 22 years old
Income in TikTok: 10.47 million rubles
Rakhim Abramov was born in Uzbekistan, at the age of 16 he moved to study at a sports school in Chita. There he worked part-time, reinstalling software for 500 rubles. The future blogger was not taken to the technical school, and then Abramov moved to Moscow, spending the money saved up on part-time work on this. He had about 10,000 rubles left to live in the capital.
To make money, Abramov and his friend began to shoot short videos – vines, the project on Instagram was called “Not Majors”, and gained almost 300,000 subscribers in a year. But Rakhim earned his first serious money when he began to shoot video on his own three years ago. For the first month I earned 100,000 rubles. “Previously, a post on Instagram cost between 600,000 and 700,000 rubles. Now I only do big projects on contracts, because I am already an artist, ”Abramov said in an interview with Forbes Digest.
Now the blogger has a large audience on social networks: almost 10 million subscribers on TikTok and more than 6 million on Instagram. Having won the love of teenagers through entertainment videos, Abramov decided to make music, and not without success: subscribers recorded a video for his song Fendi and danced to it more than 3 million times – this is an absolute record in the Russian segment of TikTok. Rakhim is one of the first Russian bloggers who started making money from music on TikTok. According to Forbes, he earned about 1 million rubles on the Fendi track
