The question was posed recently by a worried lady in her 40s as to where she could find out about online trends.
My immediate counter question was ‘should you?’
That response has re-appeared for me repeatedly in the wake of the online trend of Gen Z writing the marketing scripts.
If you’ve not seen this trend, this was a TikTok where a posh woman in her sixties takes you on a tour of her historic bed and breakfast giving a Gez Z speak commentary written by her daughter.
So, the lady’s Medieval kitchen has ‘so much rizz’, her panelled room ‘understood the assignment, slay’ and her bedrooms help you recover from a ‘Brat summer or a menty B’.
In plain English, the kitchen has lots of charm, the panelled room is perfect, which is great and the bedrooms can help you overcome a wild time or nervous exhaustion.
The comedy of this is that the older lady clearly didn’t know what the heck she was talking about. It’s a mix of grown-ups not knowing the kids and well heeled attempting to be street. It’s funny. After just over a week, the TikTok from Fyfield Manor has 2.2 million views while Curry’s who did a similar thing around the same time has 2.1 million.
The Fyfield Manor one is here…
I’m not linking the Curry’s one. In 1985, my Mum had to have a stand-up row in their Stafford branch to get them to replace a faulty cassette recorder. Some things run deep.
Since then, TikTok and Instagram have been inundated with brands making their own copies of the Gen Z marketing script. The innocence of the first clips’ work has now gone.
So, where did it all go wrong?
Blame Kamala Harris
I’ve a feeling Gen Z speak really came into the mainstream when savvy 20 somethings on Kamala Harris’ campaign borrowed the lime green imagery and black typeface of Charlie XCX’s ‘Brat Summer’ album.
It connected with a younger audience almost overnight.
Who are Gen Z, anyway? By 2025, 27 per cent of the workforce will be Gen Z. This is everyone born from 1997 to 2012 and their ages range from a hefty 27 to a just starting High school 12-year-old.
By the way, If you’re a Gen X like me but have two Gen Z kids, using Gen Z slang in their presence is magnificent. “A little piece of my dies, Dad,” my daughter told me, “when you say ‘skibbidy toilet rizz.’”
Reader, this phrase expresses displeasure at something. My offspring’s own displeasure at me qualifies her to use it but she declines. She just glares instead.
An alternative language is nothing new.
Victorian criminals used an alternative language. To ‘dry up’ was to be quiet while to be ‘peery’ was to be a snitch. The British LGBTQ community in the past have used ‘Polari’ to conceal intention from a straight audience that can sometimes mean them harm. The words ‘naff’ and ‘camp’ jumped the fence from this patois.
A trend has the life of a gadfly
So, back to the Gen Z marketing script trend. Just over a week later and dozens of brands and organisations are getting in on the act with their own copies of the trend. It now feels, to borrow a Gen Z phrase ‘a bit cringe’. Why? Because what made it work in the first place was originality, creativity and humour. Johnny Rotten once said that when they first started to wear safety pins and ripped t-shirts it was original. When everyone did it it became a uniform.
If you’ve made one yourself feel free to disregard this. But I’m starting very quickly to absolutely get tired of it. It feels like the digital equivalent of the chief exec asking you to make a rap about finance and audit scrutiny so they can connect with the kids.
In the hit 80s teen movie The Breakfast Club, Bender ridicules the teacher by asking him if Barry Manilow knows he’s raiding his wardrobe. It’s that.
So, we can safely say that trends can often have a life span the length of a gadfly.
What to do?
All this returns to the original question of knowing where trends are and should you?
There is no getting around spending time on the internet to spot trends emerge and fall like waves in the sea.
As a strategy, I still love the approach Black Country Living Museum seeing a trend then seeing if they could put their own historical spin on it. If they could they’d try it. If they couldn’t they wouldn’t.
In short, you really don’t have to know where trends are to be a communicator. If it works for you, fine. If not, don’t worry.
If you’re using a channel where these trends simply don’t really matter then don’t bother. If you’re using a channel where this can help then spend time on the platform, take out a TikTok Business account and you’ll see in the backend a list for you of the popular videos.
If you’re late to a trend you may as well not bother.
Why trends chasing can be a bad idea
I’ve been puzzling why I’ve been in despair at the large numbers of Gen Z wrote the marketing script videos. Eugene Healey, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, defined it well for me in a TikTok.
In it, he complains that brands are getting too savvy at finding and replicating original ideas. Once a trend becomes identified with generating money for a brand, he says, the fun dies and it becomes exhausting to the audience.
When one or two do it, its fun. When loads of people are do it it’s not. He calls this ‘trend inflation’.
I’ve nothing against creativity. It’s just better if you’re being creative with a new idea that may or may not work rather than something that’s a fifth generation photocopy of the Mona Lisa.
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