Think back, not even that far back, to a time in Africa when food and water didn’t cost a penny other than you tilling your garden and whatnot. You drew water from natural sources and picked your dinner from the garden. No invoice!
Then civilisation dragged economics into our societies, which, according to Lionel Robbins, is the science that studies human behaviour to find ways to make a profit by satisfying the needs related to such behaviour. Lots of English there.
To simplify it, someone smart spots a “want” before the next person does, and turns it into a market.
As a result, society split into classes, and each wanted its needs met a certain way. The middle class and the wealthy didn’t want to fetch water alongside everyone else at the communal well, because the key to success, education, taught them about germs and parasites; they wanted it piped straight into the house, metered, billed monthly. Food moved off the garden bed and into the supermarket, sold by the kilo, same story, over and over. Someone spots a need, packages it, and sells it back to you.
Now here we are again, except this time the fault line isn’t class, or race, or religion. It’s age. For the first time, the world is sorting itself by age more than anything else, and the generation redrawing the whole map right now is Gen Z (born roughly between 1997 and 2012).
Why Are Investors Sitting This One Out?
Here’s what’s different, though. Back in those times, when a shift like this hit consumer culture, investors didn’t hesitate; they jumped in and, splash, made money. This time round, a lot of capital is just err… standing at the edge of the pool, watching and blinking.
Ask an investor why, and you’ll usually get something like “these Gen Zs’ spending is too unpredictable.” Fair enough, on the surface. But I am thinking, and you will agree, it’s less about unpredictability and more about not really getting them. A lot of the hesitation isn’t financial; it’s generational discomfort dressed up as a risk assessment.
And that’s not new either. Every outgoing generation thinks the one coming behind it is a bit reckless. Boomers said it about Gen X. Now it’s happening again.
But set the eye-rolling aside for a second, and there’s a real question sitting underneath it: what if Gen Zs’ rise isn’t something older generation investors should be nervous about, what if it’s the play? Gen Z, famously, doesn’t have much capital of its own. Millennials and the generations above them do. And the creator economy has already shown what’s possible when someone from the older generation creates a platform for the younger generation purely by monetising how younger users behave. The question worth asking now is whether that model scales further: identify what Gen Z needs, package it, meter it, and sell it to them, the same way clean water was once sold to a rising middle class. And I am not even a genius!
How We Got to Gen Z
To understand where the opportunity sits, you have to understand the evolution from one generation to the next. Millennial life mostly followed a script: study hard, get a job, get married, build the home. Do this, and you are Mr Success. For the last decade or so, though, financial advisers have been telling Gen Z to skip most of that and go straight to investing and entrepreneurship instead. Good stuff!
The problem is that investing and building something of your own take exactly the things you can’t shortcut: patience, capital, a stomach for failing a few times before it works. Gen Z is short on all three right now, simply because those things take time to build, and time is the one thing they are economical with. That gap between ambition and profit-making has created a very specific kind of pressure and stress, the stress that comes with waiting for your business to start paying off. And to cope with it, a lot of young people have leaned hard into stress-relief spending, partying, dinners, flights to Dubai, self-care subscriptions, anything that offers a break from the grind.
The irony is that most Gen Zs spend more escaping burnout than they ever spent chasing the goal that caused it. I said I am not a genius, yet I noticed that.
What’s Driving the Gen Z Behaviour
Strip it down, and Gen Zs’ wants cluster around three things: information, freedom (including a chilling idea that marriage is as they observed growing up; daddy beating mummy all night, and mummy putting funny stuff in daddy’s food), and speed, catching a trend before everyone moves on.
Two things are feeding that:
Everyone’s connected to everyone, all the time. Social media broke the geographic barrier on who influences you.
Gen Z grew up watching “study, work, marry, build a house” fail to deliver for the Millennial generation that tried it first, so naturally, they went looking for a different script.
What is Gen Z Actually Buying?
Once you understand the pressure they’re under and the psychology that shapes their needs, the shopping list practically writes itself:
– Attention! (Followers, views, likes, comments)
– The tools (Phones, ring lights)
– Connection (Internet, apps, software)
– Style (Bold and loud clothes, nothing like office wear)
– Lifestyle (Expensive rental apartments beyond budget: “rather sleep hungry but sleep well, even when that sleep is just content”)
– Experiences over ownership (Travel, parties, dating, brunches, boat rides, anything worth sharing with the 100K followers).
Why This Market Is Genuinely Hard to Sell To
And to be fair to our cautious investors, this isn’t an exciting crowd to build for. Why?
#1. Tastes turn over in days, not years. A trend, a whole platform can peak and disappear before you’ve finished your business plan.
#2. A lot of what you see is curated, not real. Most Gen Z’s public lives are built for an audience, making it difficult to distinguish between what they actually want and what they want to be seen wanting.
#3. Huge influence, small wallets. They rent instead of buy, borrow instead of save, and want the expensive look at a price that isn’t expensive at all. China!
#4. They have 500K followers to influence, yet they actually influence only two or three to buy a product; the rest are in the comments doing you-know-what.
#5. They’re not buying the “climb the ladder slowly” story anymore. Having watched Millennials’ struggles, many of them are hunting for faster, less conventional routes to money, for better or worse. I didn’t say they’re selling their goodies, but you know the truth.
How You Actually Sell to Gen Zs
#1. Go cheap, go virtual, win on volume. The margin isn’t the point; the sheer size of the audience is.
#2. Invest straight into the list above, and let Gen Z sell to Gen Z. The second a brand’s marketing looks like it came from someone’s uncle, it’s dead on arrival.
#3. Lean into sexy stuff: lingerie, jewellery, tattoos, fragrance, honest YouTube content on relationships and sexuality; they don’t trust the older generation to give them straight.
#4. Sell the opposite of what their parents bought. A good chunk of Gen Z spending is simply a statement: I am not doing it your way, Mum.
#5. Sell the fantasy, not just the product. Build the asspirational image first: lifestyle, persona, then sell the pieces that complete it.
#6. Invest real money behind AI-driven production. When taste shifts this fast, betting everything on one fixed product line is a losing game. AI-assisted production can read demand almost in real time and adapt, arguably the only model built for a market this restless. In this generation, you can’t afford to rely on one skill alone; it could be outdated tomorrow.
#7. Build spaces that are for them, not aimed at them. Podcasts, vlog communities, events that meet Gen Z on their own terms, not measured against what the generation before them did better. That earns their trust.
Put loans where their interest lies: the creative economy, hackathons, and digital hustles. Help them understand how to turn these spaces into real income streams. Put money in their pockets, and two things happen: they can afford what they demand, and you become the one supplying it. Then they repay the loans that helped create that demand.
And if none of the above has convinced you yet, this should: who carries your business into the next generation, if not Gen Z? They’re the ones who will shape the generation of consumers after them. Ignore their interests, and they won’t relate with you. Give them nothing to talk about, and they won’t talk about it: no posts, no hype, no word of mouth, no second life.
A brand that never earns a place in Gen Z’s world risks dying a quiet death of relevance before it ever gets the chance to be passed down to Gen Alpha.
Compiled by Mwesigwa Joshua
