The brief, in my Consumer Behaviour module, asked us to pick a generation and a purchasing context and write something specific. I picked Gen Z and the impulse-buy decision: the moment between seeing a product and deciding, in 30 seconds or less, whether you actually want it.
What I kept coming back to in the literature was social proof. Not the textbook version (five stars, "verified buyer", that kind of thing). The newer version: a stranger on TikTok holding a product like it belongs to their life. A reply guy with 200 followers saying "honestly worth it". A Reddit thread that's openly skeptical but ends in a slow agreement.
It's not that Gen Z trusts these voices automatically. It's that they trust them more than they trust the brand voice, even when they know the strangers might also be paid, even when the brand voice is technically correct. The asymmetry is the whole story.
Trust used to scale through institutions. For Gen Z, it scales through strangers.
I drew on Strategic Management for the second half of the paper. What does this mean for brands trying to play this game without being painfully obvious about it? My answer, hedged but I'll stand by it, is that the brands doing well aren't the ones writing better captions. They're the ones building the conditions under which someone unrelated to them will say something good without being asked.
This is also why I think a lot of "performance" social media is going to look very different in five years than it does now. The lever is still proof; the proof has just moved.
I'm still working on the next chapter of this. I'd like to take it past coursework and turn it into something more substantial. Quietly hopeful that the Marketing Society will be a place to do that.