Winning the Gen Z Divide: New Engagement Rules for Brands.

Gen Z engagement demands strategies that reflect their split values, behaviors, and expectations.

Retiring the One-Size-Fits-All Gen Z Myth

Marketers have long spoken of Gen Z as a single audience with uniform interests and priorities. This generalization no longer holds. The generation is divided by formative experiences that shape how they interpret culture and choose whom to trust.

Older members emphasize participation and collective ideals shaped by civic and social movements. Younger members, raised in fragmented digital ecosystems, prize individuality, humor, and the micro-communities that define their daily interactions.

Treating them as one group leads to weak strategy and wasted investment.

Two Cohorts, Two Expectations

The divide produces distinct expectations of brands. The older cohort responds to signs of commitment, consistency, and accountability. The younger cohort is more responsive to brands that can shift tone, speak fluently in cultural codes, and respect their skepticism.

A campaign designed to appeal to both without distinction will either feel heavy-handed or superficial. Effective engagement begins with acknowledging the split and designing approaches that align with each cohort’s lived reality.

Redefining How Trust is Built

Trust is interpreted differently across the divide. For older Gen Z, it comes from a brand’s willingness to demonstrate alignment with broader values and to act visibly on them. For younger Gen Z, it comes from communication that respects their intelligence and avoids forced corporate polish.

Both groups demand coherence between what a brand claims and how it behaves, but the signals they look for are not the same. A reliable core with adaptable expressions is required to build credibility on both sides.

Offer Discovery and Sharing

Spotify’s rollout of Messages illustrates how to keep engagement inside an ecosystem while strengthening its relevance. By enabling the direct sharing of music, podcasts, and audiobooks within the app, Spotify removed the friction of shifting across platforms and allowed discovery to become an immediate exchange. This design choice aligned with Gen Z’s expectation that conversation and consumption occur in the same space, reinforcing trust through ease and familiarity.

Get Up Close and Personal

Dior’s use of Instagram’s Close Friends List showed how exclusivity can be translated into a digital environment. By presenting content through a feature associated with privacy, the brand created an impression of intimacy that mass campaigns cannot replicate. This move positioned Dior as attentive to how younger audiences experience platforms, proving that relevance can be achieved by matching the format to the context rather than amplifying reach for its own sake.

Building an Operating System for Engagement

The Gen Z divide is not an obstacle to manage but a framework for design. Brands that structure campaigns around segmented engagement, adaptive tone, and consistent values create coherence without uniformity. Discovery, sharing, and intimacy are not decorative gestures; they are operational choices that demonstrate attentiveness to audience behavior.

The outcome is credibility that holds across both sub-cohorts, avoiding the pitfalls of dilution while capturing the breadth of Gen Z’s attention.

Bottom Line

Gen Z loyalty is achieved when differences within the generation are treated as inputs for design rather than distractions.

Brands that adapt execution while maintaining a stable foundation will convert a generational split into a durable advantage.

Source: Edelman, The Great Gen Z Divide (2025, Gen Z Lab Special Report)