Marketing to Gen Z is not simply about using TikTok, creators, celebrities, or youth culture. Research suggests that trust, authenticity, brand-consumer fit, and consistent behavior matter strongly. Brands can modernize their expression while protecting the product truth, values, and recognizable identity that give consumers a reason to believe them.
Gen Z does not want your brand to act young
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Brands are expending enormous effort to look younger. More creators, more celebrities, more memes, more TikTok. But new data suggests that winning Gen Z may depend less on imitating youth culture and more on staying recognizably yourself.
Adweek recently examined ten brands that had changed their marketing to attract Gen Z, using Morning Consult data tracking favorability, purchase consideration, and trust among 10,000 Gen Z consumers between Q1 2025 and Q2 2026. The stakes are high: Nielsen estimates Gen Z could command $12 trillion in spending power by 2030. Yet only some of those brands strengthened their relationship with younger consumers. Others gained attention without improving the trust and consideration underneath it.
That raises a better question than “How do we make our brand look more Gen Z?”: How can a brand become more relevant to Gen Z without becoming less recognizable in the process?
What you will learn in this article
- Why Gen Z brand trust is harder to earn than attention
- Why authenticity is really about coherence
- What CeraVe and Coach can teach brands about staying relevant
- Why co-creation can work better than simply using young faces
- How brands can evolve for Gen Z without losing their identity
Attention is not the same thing as trust
There is a reason trust deserves particular attention. Morning Consult’s 2026 research found that 94% of the brands it tracks have lower net trust among Gen Z than among US adults overall. On average, Gen Z’s net trust is about 8 points below that of the general adult population. Morning Consult is careful not to interpret this simply as hostility toward brands. Younger consumers have had less exposure to many legacy companies, and they have grown up in an information environment where corporate mistakes can circulate instantly. But the trust gap has remained remarkably persistent.
That changes the meaning of successful youth marketing. Getting noticed is relatively easy. A celebrity can do that. A controversy can do that. A TikTok trend can certainly do that. But none of those automatically creates a reason to believe in the brand.
American Eagle is an interesting example precisely because the reaction to its Sydney Sweeney campaign became so polarized. The campaign generated enormous cultural attention and debate, yet a separate Adweek analysis of brand tracking found awareness, consideration, and preference among the intended Gen Z audience essentially flat in the period immediately following the campaign. The noise surrounding the campaign was far greater than the measured movement among the target audience.
That does not make the campaign a failure. It makes it a useful reminder that cultural visibility and brand strength are two different things.
Duolingo provides an even more interesting contradiction. The brand became one of the best examples of social-first Gen Z marketing through Duo, its deliberately unhinged green owl, and it remains one of the brands that over-indexes on trust with Gen Z compared with the broader population. Yet Adweek’s 18-month Morning Consult analysis also reported declines in favorability, purchase consideration, and trust during a period that included backlash around the company’s “AI-first” positioning. At the same time, the company continued to report very strong user growth.
That tells us something worth remembering: people can use you, laugh with you, follow you, and still become less certain about what you stand for.
CeraVe changed the entertainment, not the reason to believe
CeraVe offers almost the opposite lesson. The brand has become much more playful in its communication. Celebrities, absurd humor, social formats, and pop culture increasingly appear in its campaigns. But underneath the entertainment, one thing remains remarkably stable: dermatological credibility.
When CeraVe recently created a Gen Z-focused campaign around “tanmaxxing”, it paired celebrity entertainment with an actual dermatologist. Adweek describes this as a deliberate balance: celebrities provide entertainment, while dermatologists continue to supply credibility. The cultural expression changes, but the basic reason to believe in CeraVe does not.
That consistency appears to matter. Morning Consult’s 2026 trust data places CeraVe among the 15 most trusted brands with Gen Z in the US, with a net trust score of 42.1. Its separate beauty analysis also identifies CeraVe as one of the skincare brands successfully combining mental availability, emotional connection, category relevance, and presence in the channels where younger consumers learn about beauty.
This is an important distinction. CeraVe has not become less CeraVe in order to entertain Gen Z. It has found more contemporary ways to dramatize what CeraVe already was.
Perhaps that is what good generational adaptation looks like. Change the expression. Protect the reason to believe.
Coach did something even more interesting: it invited Gen Z inside
Coach takes the idea one step further. Rather than simply putting young faces in front of the camera, the brand has increasingly involved young consumers in the process behind the camera.
Its Spring 2026 “Explore Your Story” campaign was explicitly shaped by listening to Gen Z communities around the world and co-created with those communities. The starting point was not “What is trending on TikTok?” but a consumer tension: young people live inside a fast, short-form digital environment while increasingly seeking longer-form stories, books, identity, and spaces to slow down. Coach then connected that insight back to an existing brand platform around self-expression and the “Courage to Be Real.”
The commercial results for Coach are notable, although we should be careful not to claim that a single campaign caused them. Parent company Tapestry reported that approximately 35% of its 11 million new customers in fiscal 2026 were Gen Z, while Coach revenue grew 24% over the year. What matters strategically is that this growth happened while Coach continued to lean into recognizable elements of the brand, including leather goods, craftsmanship, the Tabby, archival styles, and heritage.
Coach did not ask Gen Z to validate a finished campaign. It allowed younger consumers to influence what the campaign became.
That difference matters to me, because it goes far beyond marketing. For years, brands have talked about representing young people. Representation means putting young people in the picture. Participation means giving them influence over the picture itself.
That is also an idea close to the original philosophy of 20something: put a youngster in every meeting.
Authenticity is not about looking imperfect
The academic research gives us another reason to take this seriously. A 2024 study involving 670 young adults from Generations Y and Z examined purpose-driven branding and found that authenticity and the fit between the brand, its cause, and the consumer contributed to brand image, which in turn influenced purchase and recommendation intentions. Authenticity played a particularly important role. [1]
That is useful because “authenticity” has become one of the most abused words in marketing. Brands frequently interpret it as using less polished videos, creators filming from bedrooms, informal language, or someone from the social team making a joke in the comments.
But authenticity is not a production style.
A brand can produce an extremely polished campaign and feel authentic. It can film something deliberately amateur on an iPhone and feel completely manufactured.
Authenticity is much closer to coherence. Does what you say fit what people already know about you? Does the behavior match the promise? Does the cause belong to the brand, or has it been attached because it is culturally useful this quarter? Does the new tone feel like an evolution of the same personality, or like an adult suddenly using teenage slang at dinner? That is why brands can make contemporary work without pretending to have been born yesterday.
Being an old brand is not the problem
There is also interesting academic evidence that Gen Z does not automatically reject established brands. A 2025 study on “inherited brands” found that brand inheritance could still influence Gen Z purchase intention, with familiarity playing an important mediating role. Nostalgia itself was weaker. [2]
That distinction is fascinating.
It suggests that the strategic answer for a legacy brand is not necessarily to erase its age. Familiarity can be valuable. Heritage can be valuable. Recognizable codes can be valuable. But history needs to connect with the present.
Gap does not need to pretend it was founded on TikTok. Coach does not need to hide that some of its most desirable bags began life decades ago. A heritage brand does not become relevant by forgetting its history. It becomes relevant by helping a new generation find a reason to care about that history.
This is particularly important because Gen Z has grown up surrounded by brands that are changing their identities, purposes, logos, platforms, ambassadors, and social voices at an extraordinary pace. What marketers experience internally as “keeping up” can look externally like a brand that no longer knows what it is.
Consistency should not mean immobility. Brands have to evolve. Culture changes, audiences change, products change, and the media environment certainly changes. But evolution works best when consumers can still see the thread connecting what the brand was, what it is, and what it is becoming.
AI makes coherence even more important
There is another reason this question is becoming urgent. AI makes it extraordinarily easy to produce more content, test more versions, personalize more messages, and respond to culture faster than ever before. It also makes it easier for brands to start sounding and looking like everybody else.
A small exploratory study in 2026 on Gen Z and digital marketing found that authenticity, transparency, and ethical communication were central to participants’ perceptions of trust. The respondents were open to AI personalization, but raised concerns about greenwashing, privacy, and the dehumanization of service interactions. Because the study involved only 40 university students, it should not be treated as representative of an entire generation, but it points toward an increasingly important tension. [3]
The advertising industry is seeing a similar gap. IAB research in 2026 found that Gen Z and Millennial consumers remain more skeptical of AI-generated advertising than advertising executives assume, while disclosing AI use can improve reactions. AI therefore makes speed cheaper. It does not make trust cheaper. If anything, when every brand can produce culturally fluent content almost instantly, knowing what not to change becomes more valuable.
Stop asking how to look Gen Z
The temptation in marketing is understandable. A new generation arrives, brands study its language, recruit its celebrities, copy its formats, and adapt their visual codes. Some of that is necessary. A brand that refuses to change eventually becomes irrelevant. But relevance is not imitation.
The better question is whether the brand can understand a new generation deeply enough to evolve without losing its own center. CeraVe can become funny without abandoning dermatological authority. Coach can invite Gen Z into the creative process while still selling recognizable Coach products. A heritage brand can use creators without pretending its history never happened.
Gen Z does not need every brand to behave like a 22-year-old.In fact, the data on trust suggests that pretending may be exactly the wrong direction. What younger consumers appear to reward is something more demanding: a brand that knows what it stands for, behaves consistently enough to be believed, and still creates enough room for a new generation to influence how that identity evolves. So perhaps the real challenge in marketing to Gen Z is not learning how to speak younger. It is learning how to change without becoming someone else.
Q&A
Yes, although authenticity should not be reduced to an informal visual style. Academic research among young consumers links perceived authenticity and brand-consumer congruence with stronger brand image, purchase intention, and recommendation. [1] For Gen Z, authenticity is often better understood as alignment between what a brand says, what it does, and what consumers already understand it to be.
Gen Z does trust brands, but Morning Consult finds that trust is generally lower than among the broader US adult population. In 2026, 94% of tracked brands recorded lower net trust among Gen Z, with an average gap of around eight points. Morning Consult notes that this partly reflects younger consumers having had fewer years to build relationships with legacy brands, rather than universal hostility toward companies.
Not necessarily. The stronger lesson is to evolve the brand’s expression without losing its underlying identity. Heritage, familiarity, and recognizable brand codes can still hold value with Gen Z. Brands should understand younger consumers and involve them in the brand’s evolution rather than simply copying whatever currently looks young.
Trying to understand what Gen Z expects from your brand?
At 20something, we help brands understand younger generations without reducing them to trends, platforms, or stereotypes. We combine generational research, cultural observation, strategy, and direct involvement from young people to understand what is actually changing and what your brand should do about it.
If your question is how Gen Z sees your category, why younger consumers are not connecting with your brand, or how to evolve without losing what made you relevant in the first place, we can turn that question into research, a strategic workshop, a dedicated study, or a keynote.
I also explore these wider generational shifts in The Gen Z Shift: Why Today’s Leaders Keep Acting on the Wrong Signals. Discover more at 20something.be and thegenzshift.com.
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