Think you know Gen Z? Think again - Interview with Matt Powell of Great State

0:00So welcome to the next edition of the Punk CX podcast. With me today I have Matt Powell who is the Creative Director at Digital Product and Service Design Agency Great State. Now Matt has over 23 years of hands-on experience shaping digital creativity for major brands including, no less, Apple, Pepsi, Mini, Marks & Spencer and leading public initiatives like Change for Life. More recently at Great State he's delivered standout projects such as Bristol Airport Sustainability Strategy and the Royal Navy's rebrand. He's a specialist in blending creative direction, user experience, and tech innovation, helping brands design digital experiences that speak to fast-evolving audiences, particularly Gen Z, which we're going to talk about today.

0:42So I did that all in one breath, Matt. I hope that you're impressed. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for having me. I've never had such a grandiose introduction as that, so I'm almost blushing, but thank you very much. You're very welcome. No, that intro aside, that's the canned one. Can you do your own? Give me a bit of a background sketch on yourself and kind of the work that you do, just to kind of give us a more like, here's a personal perspective. This is what I think that I do and the work that I do on a day-to-day basis, what stuff that I'm interested in. Yeah. As you say, I've had this privilege of working in digital pretty much since the get-go, since Google had a UK homepage.

1:28And that is great because it's just given me a perspective on how everything's evolved. I think we tend to have a real focus in the industry about talking about the last six months and the next six months. But it is lovely to be able to step back and just see how everything has evolved from the early days of kind of putting together websites without any UX because UX hadn't been invented yet. And really with next to no strategy. And it was just sort of fumbling around. But it was very, very exciting. And as you say, it gave me the opportunity progressively to work with some amazing brands. So been around the block.

2:04And that is career, I suppose, has taken a few different forms. I would have at some point, I'm sure, called myself a digital advertising kind of creative director. Then broader comms and marketing stuff and digital ecosystems for brands and all sorts of kind of things like that. And there's been a couple of real privileges, as I say. I think one of them is just I've worked with some really brilliant minds. not just those kind of strategists and engineers, but some really, really cool people. So I've done some work with the likes of David Putnam, who won an Oscar for Chariots of Fire. I've had the privilege of meeting Mark Zuckerberg.

2:41I've even had work declined by Steve Jobs, allegedly. So that's all good stuff, right? But what I found was after a while, and I think you can relate to it, I think we're probably of a similar age. You start after a while to yearn for brands with a bit more purpose. And you need to set yourself new challenges. So around 2022, I moved to Great State, which is an independent agency. That's the kind of agency I love. And it gave me the chance to work with some organizations with a real sense of purpose. So yes, the Royal Navy, and I'll refer to them a fair amount because it is a really interesting case study and it links very much back to that subject agenda.

3:18But also the RNLI, some higher education brands and some brands closer to home, like Longleaf Safari Park. so they were a cx agency and that c does stand for customer i think for us it could be anything it could be employee experience volunteer experience student experience um and i'm just still really really excited by the industry awesome now as i mentioned in my intro and you sort of alluded to to it when you were talking kind of then there's gen zed gen z depending on where you're kind of from is how it's pronounced is is a well a group of a demographic that is sometimes feel like oh it's just them young then the young folk over there but they're also kind of going to bet they are um growing kind of massively as a proportion of the work the workforce as they kind of grow up totally and understanding them can sometimes feel for many brands, I think, can sometimes feel quite troublesome in many ways.

4:21And so you produced, or Great State rather, and yourself kind of recently released some research called Shifting States, which examines Gen Z behaviors and digital expectations. And I had a look at it and I was like, wow, there's some really kind of cool stuff in there. That's why I wanted to kind of come on and have a bit of a rummage around some of the research. So first of all, can you tell me a little bit about the research and sort of how it came about and some of the main sort of headlines just to sort of set the tone yeah absolutely so i mentioned i named up to few uh brands and organizations we work with there and what those organizations all have in common we found is that they're grappling grappling was the word you kind of use troublesome but they're grappling with meeting the expectations of that next generation you know if we take that example of the royal navy they recruit thousands of 16 to 24 year olds every year and they have to you know it's not that they have a um a retention problem it's just that as an organization they tend to release people after 22 years of service so you've constantly got people stepping out at the top and you've got to fill that funnel and that means with people who almost fairly and squarely fit into that gen z category and that is a challenge you know we're talking about an organization that's over 400 years old.

5:39But they're still hyper relevant today. You've only got to switch on television. Defence spending is making the news every week at the moment. And that whole thing just led us down a path, really. We just sort of had to ask ourselves, do we understand Gen Z? If we're going to do that job as the agency of the Royal Navy to help them recruit that next generation. And so that just grew. It grew into a fairly sizable report in the end of the day, because a lot has been said about gen z but not enough relating gen z preferences and how they think and how they act to customer experience as an industry so in an in a nutshell we discovered there are some misunderstandings about them and some processes i suppose that agencies hold dear right are a bit are a bit out of whack i mean we'll come back to that kind of latter kind of point but i think what I wanted to start with though is to get your perspective on people talk about Gen Z sometimes it kind of can be slightly nebulous right yeah it's like people talking like oh boomers and Gen X and millennials and Gen Zs and these words get thrown around but we don't actually know really kind of what sort of proportion of the population the working population that we're talking about and how their influence and proportions is is predicted to grow over the coming kind of years Definitely.

6:58And so I thought I'd ask you, give us a sense, kind of like where we're at and what's likely to happen, because then it, I guess, puts our arms around the problem, right? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think the basic fact of it is we're talking about those people born roughly in the late 90s and maybe 97, 98 onwards to about 2010. So what we're looking at today as we see them is those people who are age 15 to late 20s. that probably represents because every country is different right they have different aging kind of demographics you look over at countries like japan they have kind of challenges which are different to our own but we're talking about 18 to maybe to 20 percent of the uk population okay now that number won't change right that's that's that's the percentage that they are but i think you'll see that that will as they shift you know as you say 15 to late 20s you're talking about people who are still in education, still gaining qualifications, or perhaps being in first jobs.

7:59So we're talking about those people really coming on stream progressively and becoming the consumers with the spending power. And we know that's a big influence on everything and everything we do. So they're going to become more integral to the workforce. They're going to really come into their prime. And I think that will therefore turn into influence. I think we're seeing that we need to lean into their sensibilities and that actually older audiences that are still part of the equation will fold in i think you can do things which will either sort of ostracize older audiences to reach younger ones but we try to find that balance between being really inspired by them rather than see them as a problem and then find ways to sort of cultivate that so it doesn't kind of push away older older demographics when we're building say a site or something awesome and so So thank you for that.

8:47I mean, just because it's a good context setting, but I want to kind of then circle back to the thing that you alluded to before, and it's mentioned in the report. Yeah. Because there's a bit in the report that talks about old methods, old tools, old thinking. And then I was reading through the report, and I was like, then it's quickly followed by the line which says, quality has been sacrificed for quantity as the optimization runs at full tilt. Yeah. And I was like going, there's a banked rock kind of like line yeah so tell me what are you getting at kind of here yeah that you know part of that experience i suppose of working in marketing is that i think i feel like this kind of seen that there's ways of working and there's schools of thought and they have been you know relied upon and they're no longer going to be fit for purpose i really feel like having done this research into gen z i feel that and i'll point out kind of three of them to you now but I think that are fundamentally a bit broken as techniques.

9:48So I think the first one is think about, you know, if you've rattled around agencies a little bit like I have, you know that they're full of things like marketing playbooks, quite fixed personas of people, you know, and you look at the data on that kind of like, this is the persona of our audience and it's dated from two, three years ago. You've got things like publishing pillars and publishing strategies. you've got reach and frequency models you've got all of these things which we quite like i think as an industry because um they make us feel like experts and they're you know their own agencies are under a lot of pressure to kind of get results so you kind of need methodologies to do that but i think what we're seeing with is the evidence that jen said just won't respond to the outputs of using those kind of methods.

10:40They're thinking more fluidly than that. They're more agile and they're seeing the world through slightly different kind of lenses. And if you, for example, you take a publishing pillar and you're kind of repeatedly talking about the same things again and again, I just don't think it's going to wash because there isn't the same level of trust and belief in kind of what you're saying that there once was. So that's your first one. Yeah, go on. Do you want me to go? Yeah, I'm just going to keep going. So I'm going to come back to that sort of the contextual kind of bit around kind of what you talked about there don't follow certain paths but let's cannot let me not interrupt and so we've got pillar one yeah pillar two chasing trends so i think this is one which again we've we've kind of as an industry it's really really fallen foul of really kind of getting into reactive marketing grabbing at some popular influence at the moment to promote things we're just not seeing i think the gen z are as influenced by those sorts of things as they were you know um maybe that's because of the sort of just sheer vast amount of content there is out there whether it's you know we're seeing kind of more trends around de-influencing as well rather than influencing which we could come on to as well but i think chasing trends isn't a way forward and i think it's far too much energy expelled on doing that to try and look credible uh and the focus is on the wrong thing right and the third one if we do it quickly yeah is this is is you mentioned optimization you know the optimization model yes i saw sort of really firsthand you know um the way that optimization took off as a sort of a sort of philosophy for doing things you know running out multiple permutations of experience just testing things relentlessly until you get to the optimal performing thing and i think there are challenges with that because i think with gen z you're they're coming across as lacking authenticity there's not any uniqueness about that it's just relentlessly following the numbers so i think it misses the beat with kind of great craft and i think we're starting to see the link between gen z and aesthetics and craft being really actually really important so i think optimization faces some challenges going forward so on that last point i thought there was it thought it was interesting because that's interesting because actually at the end of every year um i take on this was an increasingly gargantuan task of producing a um a set of customer experience predictions for the set of the years i don't write them myself so i've got no crystal ball what i do do is i invite a whole bunch of people and it's quite open to submit their thoughts and then i try and curate them into a set of themes and this last year i ended up having i ended up having about 400 different predictions from about 300 different folk that i cut down into about just over 40 and then curated them into about like 15 different sort of like themes with some commentary and narrative around it and interestingly the thing that that emerged from that was this idea about like branding and about actually doing almost like old school kind of branding do something that stands out don't just follow the trends because actually the environment if you think about seo and paid for search and all of these different sort of things and how people use their user data and stuff like the whole kind of optimization performance marketing type side of things i that was being almost like completely upended by these answer engines kind of there is coming into the space and what they're doing and and how the cost of keywords and stuff is becoming so competitive and so expensive that there's there's this pressure to rethink how do you actually reach people how do you connect with people how do you do it in the right sort of kind of way yeah and how old school kind of branding is going to be um take more of a um a front and center role it feels like.

14:43Because you've got to connect with people. And then it made me think about also going to go back to that sort of thing you talk about, old thinking and stuff. And it made me think about back to also the Gen Z side of things and where they're coming from. And it seems to me that some of this thinking is based on old assumptions. And And there's a quote I love that comes from Alan Alda, the American actor, who apparently was, he actually did gave a commencement sort of speech at his daughter's college one year. And there was a part in the speech, and this is a quote that I've used frequently, but I just love it.

15:26And he said, you know, assumptions are your windows on the world. You should clean them off once in a while so you can see clearly. And I love that. And you're talking about this kind of things are kind of broken. And I want to just then just to ask you about, so what assumptions are we getting wrong about Gen Z's? Where are they coming from? What are the things that are kind of broken? What do we need to understand in terms of their context and why they predict, as a report says, why they're predictably unpredictable? Yeah. Yeah. And I, before I kind of answer that, I just pick up on that point you made about brand, you know, I don't know all the answers, but what I do know is that you always treat our clients with respect because they're really smart people.

16:15And one of my mantras is that the most underestimated quality in award-winning work is the client because their instincts are often very, very right. And what we have found in the last probably 18, 12, 18 months is a greater emphasis on brand, on visual brand. Now, I know brand for me is, I was always taught that brand was promise, personality and product. You know, it's a layered thing. But I'm talking about, you know, branding moves forward. It's not, I think it's a good idea to get stuck in the past. but i think we've seen a bit of a renaissance of a new version of branding being really important yeah it's more dynamic it's more um uh it's more digital first um it's more interactive than it's ever been uh but it's a very important layer and it means a lot to our clients and they're investing in that so i think that is a bit of a bellwether sign yeah but if we go back to your question then that yeah there's that phrase and it comes up in that report isn't it about predictable unpredictability, which in itself feels a bit kind of like, hang on, what are we talking about there?

17:26But the point is this, right? So I think Gen Z, let's call them Gen Z, appear to be very, very unpredictable. And actually, I think one of the first brands to really acknowledge this was Vogue Business. And they famously said that Gen Z broke the marketing funnel. And it's true, we're not seeing this group going through the very standard buckets of awareness, interest, desire, action in a convenient manner. And I say that because we've seen it with the Royal Navy. As I say, we're interested in not selling them a product, but interesting them in a career. And we see the analytics that you would anticipate people perhaps seeing us on social, seeing fantastic photography of ships and careers, and then coming to the site.

18:10perhaps then exploring it as a broad role is this a career path for me could i do it what what are the pros and cons and then maybe settling in and going okay what do my qualifications entitle me to do and we don't see that we see people coming to the site landing straight onto a role then going backwards and having a look at some of the wider material then leaving the site to go to social so it's almost you know it's this kind of messy middle that we kind of see ourselves in and we've had to kind of engineer things to sort of expect that a little bit never assume you've seen us before and actually kind of like take any touch point as an opposite opportunity to just create a bit of positive influence but as i say the the thing that really we really got to the nub of in the report was to challenge the idea of chaotic and you covered it yourself at the very very beginning you know this is a generation who pretty much only experienced uncertainty you know when we look back at it you know there was a point in time in their formative years when they had three prime ministers in the space of 44 days they thought they were going to school and then covid arrived they thought they might have plans to travel and then suddenly you have things like brexit even fundamental simple fundamental things like money you know get a job earn some money all of that's just been inverted as well you know we've had uh crypto and we've had mr beast making a mockery out of earning living i myself had an inf a sort of uh an influencer as part of my team and i remember really having this conversation with her where she said um do you mind if i do some some paid posts for a product and i said well unfortunately i do because that product is a competitor to one of the clients that we have as an agency and she said yes but i can earn more money doing those three posts than you pay me in a year and i remember thinking what is going on?

20:06What is going on? And you kind of realize that, you know, even some of those simple things like foundational things that we'll kind of grow up with and expect were just not there. And you've only got to add in fake news and a bunch of other stuff as well. And you realize, you know, that's going to have a profound effect on their psyche, I suppose. Ironically, I was thinking about this the other day, probably one of the most consistent things other than things like family, obviously, which still exists. But if you look out there in the commercial world, probably the iPhone is one of the most consistent things because it's been around since 2007 and just gone through small evolutions, but it's always been in your hands.

20:44So weirdly, there hasn't been a lot of consistency, but technology has sort of been one of them. But anyway, go on, sorry. No, I think that's the thing is that, I know we were talking before we started recording, is that we must appreciate, now it's easy to say, but it's it's harder to actually get as it were when you say that so you and i are of an age where we knew of the world pre-internet yeah which would be completely anathema to kind of gen z you're like what do you mean like right and that's pre-mobile phone and kind of pre-internet and we lived our life and grew up, you know, grew up understanding, you know, that you can live in, there's a little bubble and you can be unplugged from the news and information and things.

21:37And then the world felt really large and then things kind of changed. And now it's like everything feels very local. The world feels very small because it's almost like we're connected. And I think that's what I mean about the, we can say that people are digitally native, but actually what we need to really understand and really spend some time thinking about is what does that actually mean from their perspective, contextually? And what is it, how do they feel? What does it drive, how does it drive their behavior? Because actually, and it's going to continue to change with the advent of, you know, and the massive rise of artificial intelligence, particularly around generative AI, and how that's going to changing lots of different things.

22:19And we'll continue to change things. And it's almost about foundationally, based on how you and I would think, that foundationally things are getting eroded. And you almost have to be... I was thinking about this the other day. There's a film that Eddie Murphy was in, and I think it's called The Magic Dagger or something. And he's jumping from across this chasm from post to post, but they're almost disappearing sort of thing. He's got to keep moving in order to cross this thing. And it feels like that. It feels quite precarious. Yeah, I think that might be the golden child. Golden child, thank you.

22:56Yes, that's right. I remember seeing it at the cinema. Great fun. Yeah. And so we're trying to make sense of that. And, you know, where we've arrived at is, as you say, you know, why wouldn't those things kind of change your brain chemistry? I think what we've realized is, though, that it isn't chaotic. They're just incredibly good at adapting. And we really kind of use this word of fluidity. And what I mean by that to try and not use the get into the realm of buzzwords is just if you've learned something to be true one day and then in social media it's disproved the next day, then it's okay to be of a sort of person that goes, okay, this is what I think is good or bad today.

23:41And I reserve the right to have a different opinion on that tomorrow. I'm going to be fluid enough to not get in a rut. I'm going to continuously process, continually absorb and continually decide what is right and what's wrong and what's good and what's bad. And actually, I think if you can understand that, then you can start to say those things like those playbooks I was talking about five minutes ago don't work because their mentality or their approach could be to a brand, it could be to a career, it could be to anything, may not be the same as it was based on processing all of this information so yeah we need to kind of think of them as being extremely fluid and therefore agencies need to fall in step with that and so let's okay then let's maybe kind of like address some sacred cows that go around kind of gen z's um because there is a lot of you know there's a lot of kind of talk that says it's all about sustainability or it's all about personalization um is that true or is it again is it fluid yeah i'd say not entirely true um and i'm conscious of this being a research piece that was done around with around about 2 000 um people but uh and as i say everybody's kind of unique but if we just kind of try to aggregate the numbers a little bit we found that maybe 90 percent of people said the things like social responsibility and values and sustainability would be an influence on them following a brand or approving of a brand but conversely only about a quarter of people said that they really actively researched things like sustainability practices right so you could say there's a sort of contrary thing there It's important, but I won't actually go out of my way to research it.

25:28I think, though, just as a brand, if you're a brand with values, what that means is you should get those front and center. They're important, but you've got to kind of make the effort to kind of put that in that experience or that journey. Make it really easy for them to discover it. Relay that with as much authenticity as you can muster and make it engaging as well. And then I think that's potentially a bit of a recipe for winning. So if we take, again, just head back to the Royal Navy for an example, less sustainability, but more about, say, something like other sort of values. You know, the Royal Navy does really good things, humanitarian relief and protecting kind of people from piracy and those sorts of things.

26:15Those are good, solid things to talk about. And actually, most people at a superficial level don't even stop and consider those things. So what we try to do, even though people are moving around in non-linear ways these days, is try to make sure those are visible so that as you're traversing the site or having an experience, you come across those things and we portray them. You know, keep it brief, keep it concise, keep it punchy, but make sure those values are landed so that they can make their own decision about whether that's right for them or not. And I just want to go back and ask on the kind of personalization.

26:49I mean, is it super important as well? Or is it one of those things that people are a bit like, yeah, it's nice. Because everybody's in the industry, everybody in the customer experience space is like, oh, yeah, it's personalization. It's personalization or nothing. And you're like going, hmm, is it there? Well, I kind of anticipated you'd ask about personalization. And I almost wanted to begin with a caveat. As a creative director, I'm a comparatively simple creature. I remember years ago when I worked on Marks and Spencers, the guys tried to sit down with me and explain the personalization strategy that they were going to take.

27:32Afterwards, I said, no, I just don't get what you're saying. And I said, okay, let me put it this way. We're going to try and do things that feel serendipitous rather than stalk people. And I, okay, got it. And we just kind of like, that's about as deep as I could manage to get around it. But if we loop forward to today, you made a really interesting point there. Gen Z, I think they just expect personalization now. It's kind of a bit intolerable to kind of work with kind of irrelevant material. And I think, as you say, the watch out there is the first rule of personalization is no personalization is better than bad personalization.

28:10I think it's kind of one of those things that still rings true today. if we look at it though again i don't want to kind of get mired in statistics but we kind of said you know again 85 or so engage of gen z engage with with personalized content it's a good driver for engagement but we see very very low amounts of people who are comfortable with their data being used freely yeah so that sounds again you could draw out of that that sounds quite contrary i don't want my data being used but i do want to personalize experience so how does that work and i think what we've got to do is just kind of get to that place where we don't see things like opting in or kind of that consent for data that's just a tick box exercise you're going to see that as the start of a really interesting creative brief yeah if you go if you think about the use of data you can turn that into a really interesting conversation to have with people and go you know what we'd really like you to make you feel like a vip and we're going to give a lot if you give us a little bit and actually there should be more focus on that what creatively can you do how do you create the win-win uh where the organization uses data responsibly and the gen z sort of person you're trying to speak to feels like it was a fair trade rather than it just being these kind of casual or last minute just to stick something on there that says can you opt in so we can spam you please i mean i think the the i think it was oh probably about seven years ago i think it was forrester coined this kind of like this idea there's a there's a personalization paradox exactly kind of like to what you said is that going the majority of people say they want uh personalization i think that's a good thing majority of brands want to deliver it but also customers have this serious concerns about data privacy security and all these different sort of things and i think the the the one thing that the brands don't worry brands do because it feels like i don't know why they don't do it as much as they should it's like almost being transparent about what sort of data they're they're collecting and kind of why and how they're using it i see people trying to do it and so like you know and but it gets mired in the whole data privacy policies and and kind of like do you accept this or do you accept that and all these different sort of things but i think there's the feels to me there's room for people to be a bit more up front and center within their comms about this this is kind of this is what we promise this is what we're going to do but take it out of legal speak in many ways yeah and just be kind of like if you want to be personal then be personal about it don't get your lawyer to lawyer to talk to the customer like talk to the customer yourself as if you're personally like going we take this because this is good regardless of if it's our own and we use it for this um and i think that that sort of level of transparency would actually build that top trust and alleviate some of those concerns don't you think i do transparency and i think it links back a little bit to something we were talking about five minutes ago which is brand so i think what you're describing there and that sort of legalese sort of language well is that how your brand would speak to somebody and we're seeing again as well as visual brand guidelines, verbal brand guidelines becoming important.

31:31For a couple of reasons, I think that is one of them. So it doesn't descend into that sort of language where you suddenly feel very distant from what the organization, simply by the tone that they're using. But also because of AI, because more of it is going to be conversational, because it is going to be sort of two-way dialogue. I think, yeah, there's a lot more emphasis on that brand, finding that voice a strong voice that isn't just a generic voice so all of these things start to sort of overlap a little bit at some point and i think personalization though i don't think what i what i'm not sitting here saying is kind of back away from it for for data issues i think it just needs to be done responsibly and actually it's it's important i think it's now an expectation rather than an advantageous thing i think you'd see people backing away from brands that don't get them um and i think personalization is is you know um parallel to that idea of getting me but i do think there's a choice right it's a bit like going back to a point that you made before it's like it's not it's not just like a continuum it's almost like a chasm between two points you either um do it well and do it you know do it right and do it well on the one side of things really commit to it or don't do it at all and just distinguish yourself in a sort of a generic kind way because actually like you said it's like no personalization is better than bad personalization um and so it's almost a bit like a binary thing it's like if you're going to do it then do it and commit to it and do it right yeah because you'll get rewarded for that but be careful because because people will see through it and again i go back to the back to another piece of research back from that sort of time around six seven years ago the most one of the most alarming I mean, there was an parallel piece of research.

33:19One of the most alarming sort of like stats was that, I can't remember who did it, but they were asked all marketeers about personalization. Yeah, it's brilliant. But then they also kind of like said, about 60, 65 % of all the marketeers admitted that some of the things that they would have done, they themselves would describe as being creepy. And so it's a bit like, go and make sure that you're on the right side of the line, as it were. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as I say, I've kind of been around, seen sort of media agencies and creative agencies. And I think one of those kind of, there is that disturbing phrase, isn't it?

33:59Sort of the dark arts of how some of these things work. And I think it's, that's obviously kind of should cause a bell to kind of ring that something's not quite right. I think we're going to see, like, give you an example, just you know how familiar we are now with having dark mode light mode um on a you know which which would you prefer from a sort of uh comfort and accessibility kind of perspective i think you see more sites with a kind of like the personalized or the non-personalized version so you can just toggle and just just see how that kind of changes or that a bit a few more sites i think you see going this is actually what we know about you or what we think we know about you would you like to erase that do you want to correct it do you want to add to it you know a bit more of that sort of stuff so again it feels really really transparent and i think brands have got a real responsibility to do that kind of stuff um because they are custodians of your data i think one of the things is interesting as well is you know we see these stories about data leaks but i think unless things have an impact on you so you had your data uh somebody kind of um sort of faked being you and kind of took money from your account you'd obviously have any huge and immediate and visceral kind of reaction to that but i think we see these data leaks sometimes happen and they're reported on the news but it has no bearing on you personally so they soon go away for that reason and that isn't a gen z thing i think it's just a kind of human nature thing you sort of nod but if it doesn't have a material impact on you then you sort of don't stress about it too much but i think this is a really it is a huge area you know we all know that there's thousands of data points on you And it's just remembering we've got a responsibility there.

35:35Yeah. And so you've painted this picture of a, let's call it, reused the phrase of predictable and predictability. And to help brands build that reciprocal loyalty, I mean, I know the report's not just a piece of research, but there's some guidance in there around how brands can build that reciprocal loyalty. And you've to distill that into five principles. And I wonder if you could tell me about them kind of briefly and kind of what they mean for brands marketing activities. Yeah, I'm, as I say, I love being a practitioner rather than the sort of theoretical kind of person. So we did kind of want to turn into things that we can do as a sort of actual good habits.

36:17Five then. So I think the first of those was just commit to continuous discovery. Okay. So as I said, you know, you've got, you don't want to be kind of leaning on older documentation on how to do things. Constantly try and listen, constantly try and adapt and question your assumptions about what Genza needs. Now that might sound a bit trite, but I think it's gone, you know, that sort of agility and continuous discovery thing. It's sort of gone from being a buzzy word thing to being really essential now. And the good news is there's just so many tools. You know, we use some interesting tools like Ballpark and Askable.

36:55They're great ways of doing quick user research and getting a quick turnaround. And as a creative director, I'm working with designers and there's all sorts of tools. You know, we're working extensively in Figma, but, you know, they're constantly adding tools that will allow you to turn a flat design into a sort of a moving prototype. Again, that gives you much realer assets, much faster, again, to test, put them into the mix. see how people kind of do they like them do they not is something missing from that so yeah continuous discovery rather than very long and bloated kind of processes waterfall processes where you just end up with a product at the end of it just keep on asking is this right can we do it better second one i think is just and i cannot over overstress this one is creating effortless experiences we just hear it time and again whether we're doing vox pops is whether we're doing sort of quantitative research people want ease and speed um make it frictionless you know really put the energy and the time into the touch points including the ones further down the process i sort of mentioned earlier there's a lot of emphasis on the top of the funnel but i think looking at making the experience as frictionless as possible and easy to use is absolutely where the win is you We see both analytically and in terms of, as I say, research, people will walk away from, particularly in that audience demographic, will walk away from inconvenient things.

38:22So that's the second one really is. Can I make effortless experiences? I just want to make a note on that, or maybe to comment on that. Because I think it also, because people can pick these up and run with them, these ideas. And you mentioned friction too. people talk about they conflict sort of the effortless with friction free and the thing I always kind of think about that is that but we need to also understand there's there's such thing as good and bad friction yes totally and and if you eliminate both sometimes you can undermine the value that you create through that sort of interactive kind of like kind of process I remember hearing a story about a brand it was an e-commerce brand they were they got stuck into this let's make it friction free and they did all that and they're straight through made it super easy customers coming in may do what they need to do and then came out the the back end so the processing was kind of much faster but what they found was that their ability to retain customers just fell through the floor and the reason when they stopped and they investigated the reason the thing that they found was actually there was a point in the process where the customer had to make a certain number of choices that was actually about their own choice.

39:46And that was the choice friction in that sort of like journey that actually created the value because it empowered them with things and they go like, I want this and I want that and I want this and that made it their own. And when they end up winding that back, keeping some of the elimination of the bad friction, but then reinstating some of the good friction then things started to reinstate themselves and so i just put like a health warning on some of that stuff yeah i i think it's a lovely kind of build um on what i was talking about that to tell you the design pattern that worries me most that it's gone is the one about putting in card details you know uh 16 digit card details in your cvv because that was a cooling off a micro cooling off period right that was that chance that the people to go do i really need this do I really want to buy it or could I live without it and that's been actually I'd say you know we've robbed people of that you know now it is just Apple Pay done and I suppose things like that are part of the reason why I wanted to get into more an agency with more with more brands on the books that were not about kind of just converting people uh and not just about sort of selling consumerism into things with a bit more value because things like that are a little bit troubling and we're getting to that place where people are willing to make purchases on mobile uh life-changing purchases on mobile you know the the joke there's a there's a good joke in social media which is about millennials going oh i've got to move from my mobile phone to my laptop for that that's a big decision um whereas we don't see that we'll see people uh expressing an interest in joining the navy on their phone just like that now the good news is don't worry you don't just kind of press a button and that's it you're going to get dragged into a naval base there's there's a lot of process about aptitude and eligibility and are you sure and all of those sorts of things so i can sleep well at night knowing that if you hit that button going i'm interested you're not signing your life away excellent um and so that was took us to what two principles so what's the third one it's guiding people and i kind of think this is a nice allied I point to the one that you're making.

42:05You know, what we see is people roving around and getting the information they need from as many sources as necessary. Now, this one, you know, so what we're saying is to just help people, to take the time to think, can reviews, can user-generated content, can strong community signals help you arrive at the right decision? you know one of the things we looked at was um what sort of things on your phone do you trust the most and the one that came out for gen z that they trusted the most was reddit okay um and of course reddit is that sort of you know big bumbling kind of massive kind of real kind of comments um but um interesting that that scored really highly but it's real people there's real people talking about yeah real things right and it's just perspective and and and it's like um you're throw yourself into the middle of the community and you find you see kind of what the uh what opinion is and then you might be more informed you might not necessarily be sold on it but you're more informed because it's not if you like brand generated content it's it's it's just people's opinions yeah and what we noticed that was particularly challenging something like the royal navy so they they've changed a lot over probably the last 20 30 years you can imagine like a lot of organizations um the mentality um is is fantastic now but if you go back like any organization there's a few salty sea dogs and people probably with quite old-fashioned views on the world and what we found was that people were roving around looking for information about could i join should i join and ending up in forums or chat rooms with some of those kind of slightly older opinions on how things work.

43:49And we didn't kind of want to expose people to that because we didn't think it was representative of the modern experience. So what we ended up doing for the Royal Navy was actually building a new content format. We called it Stories, and it was basically the sort of material you would get from social media, but plugged into the site. So it's a full screen experience. It borrows from the design pattern of Instagram Stories. just tap for the next full screen sort of just working through sort of snacks of visuals and little kind of factoids and it kind of almost emulates that experience of going out to social media to try and get that additional evidence and we did use more authentic imagery and and truer more human stories in there so that the main site experience was the massive incredible photography of aircraft carriers and destroyers and things like that but then there was this slightly more human hey this is what it's kind of like this is what life in board is like or is is the little human side of things so that people could get more of what they needed in that sort of in that experience and and it'd be really modern up-to-date content awesome so that's three i'll rattle through the other two okay fourth one we've already thankfully we've already covered off it's that one about chasing trends i think trends are very fleeting gen z uh i think see through a lot of that kind of reacting marketing stuff now um and i'd say yeah focus the attention on making them feel like vip is further down the process rather than just chase the kind of reactive stuff and that fifth one we've also covered off as well it's that one about uniqueness it's a which i i really firmly put it the feet of the brand um development this generation do get bored easily they do value aesthetics more uh than than i think other generations so create that find that brand differentiator codify it into a design system make sure that interacting with your brand feels different to any other even if you cover the logo and that picture you could still tell it's that organization there's something about the way that you interact with it it's kind of it's it's personality on the on the screen is important really really important so being unique and sticking with that i think is that fifth attribute awesome um matt that to be fair that sounds like a lot if you're going to listen to this is it like a a brand kind of person or a marketeer and stuff and and so i thought well you know so apart from actually recommending every download the the research i'll put a link to the kind of the research in the show notes and things yeah cool um what should marketers be doing first to dive into this because this might you know there might be a case of like some people might be thinking well yeah i think i had an i i might have had an understanding or you know grip on or grasp of what was going on here but you're telling me a whole bunch of things that might make me go shit i've got a lot of work to do where should i start i sometimes start the day thinking that as well um i'll okay if we summarize it i think you know How do you start?

46:53I think what we're saying is one, prototype fast. Don't kind of sit on things for a long time. Think about ways to sort of spin up ideas quickly. You may want to kind of build it properly on a good solid kind of technology stack later, but prototype first and find out if things are working. Second of all, yeah, just throw away, I think, those really rigid personas. Start with a bit of a blank sheet when it's kind of like, who's our audience for this one third one i think do prioritize quality design over trendy content i think fourth is that that you know we're seeing adaptability and agility is really important and the most common thing we hear when clients come to us into is normally around technology and engineering it's i'm too rigid i can't move with the times so work and collaborate with clients to build really adaptable technology sort of stacks i think so that you can move things like headless ms things like that are really important okay and i think finally just rethink your kpis you know we all love a key performance indicator just focus on the relationship rather than just on on cheap conversion tactics perfect thank you and so we've rattled through a whole bunch of different things you give me some great advice uh before we get to some quickfire questions to wrap up anything that you want to add or highlight that we've missed out no only that you know we've we have barely touched on ai today i think i think we know it's going to change it's not a bad thing you'll have no i'm sure no shortage of people talking about it it will change everything but um maybe we'll maybe get to give people a breather from it just this once uh it's on our mind a great deal uh like every agency i suppose but um maybe not one for today well exactly i mean i think the thing is it's like what i would say is that yeah it's an important dimension but we're talking about people here.