In the girl economy, marketers need to treat discerning Gen Z customers with respect

Gen Z Voices explores the Gen Z perspective on marketing, technology, social media and the future of the ad industry. Submit your essays here. The year is 2023, and girlhood is everywhere. We have “girl dinner.” We have “rat girl summer.” Tomato Girl. Strawberry Girl. Hot Girl Walk. Girl's girl. As internet commentator Mina Le pointed out, “We are living in a girl economy.” Sometimes it feels like “girl,” as a term, is separated from actual, experiential girlhood to mean something else in this internet age. It feels somehow genderless, just as applicable to boys as to girls, evidenced in how Pedro Pascal is babygirl and in the same way that “Succession’s” Tom Wambsgans is my Princess Diana. Boys can have a Tomato Girl aesthetic. Boys can be part of Girls Night. While it feels like it has evolved as part of Gen Z’s uniquely progressive perspective on sex and gender—being on the whole more embracing of sexual orientations and genders other than cisgender and heteronormative—the girl phenomenon is, to me, something else. It has come as girl cultural currency seems to be at its peak, with Taylor Swift on tour, the rise of the coquette aesthetic and “Barbie” making movie history with $1.4 billion in revenue so far. Everyone, of any gender, creed and orientation, is living in girl world. We’ve seen this culture of the girl backfire immensely, with people rightly calling out the internalized misogyny of the idea that girls can’t think about the Roman Empire and instead think about the “Pride and Prejudice” movie, or how TikTok’s Girl Math has singlehandedly undone years of feminists fighting for recognition and encouragement of women in math. We can’t do math, but it’s a girl economy. Go figure. Ad Age Gen Z Contributor Column We welcome Gen Zers to submit fresh takes exploring Gen Z within the ad industry Learn more here Ribbing aside, there are also the very real dangers that come with being a girl online. Seventy-six percent of adolescent girls have received unsolicited dick pics, 58% say they have been harassed on social media and 75% of women aged 18-24 say they have been harassed during online gaming. So, when being a girl online is so inherently sticky and spiky—not to mention dangerous—why do people of all genders insist that they are “girl”? What does it mean? Maybe, in fact, being a girl in the online world is just a recognition and acceptance of the horrors of the internet. Many people of the correct Gen Z age, regardless of gender, understand what being a girl can symbolize: being told by the media what your identity is and what it means, what you mean and then watching the media deconstruct those very ideas in front of you. The current cultural language is one of meta-analysis and post-irony, so why shouldn’t the cultural movement be, too?Related: Submit questions for our next Gen Z roundtable Consider the particularly poignant Gen Z quote, “I am a girlboss i am a war criminal i am a lunatic . i am clinically insane & the next virgin mary & i am never going to die,” which is still passed around since originating on Tumblr two years ago. In one line, it encapsulates the idea of girlhood in its multiple facets, acknowledges the inachievability of it all as well as the hypocritical nature of the media that tends to portray girls as all of these things. Effectively it’s saying this is what it means to be girl—which is impossible—and you have to accept it, and to accept it is to become girl. If Riot Grrrrl was girl-anger, and I’m-not-like-other-girls was girl-denial, and the works of Ottessa Moshfegh are girl-depression, then I think the current online climate of girlism is girl acceptance. And if to accept is to be girl, then to live in ignorance is “boy,” and no Gen Z truly lives in ignorance (despite scrolling TikTok while watching a movie in the background in an attempt to ignore global politics, warming and injustices.) The point is no one who is really online lives in ignorance, and therefore, everyone is girl. While this may seem like an incredibly difficult space for marketers to navigate—especially those not native to the Gen Z idea of terminally online post-modern metahumour—it really isn’t. The girl label is just one given to someone who can identify and recognize the typical tropes that the media tends to throw at them, being as hyper-aware of content as they are. Just take the hugely successful BBDO campaign in Thailand, which highlighted how the advertising world simply doesn’t understand Gen Z, or the Grimace Shake, which evolved into a bizarro sendup of analog horror alongside McDonald’s commemorative release. While the girl trend is one that could be born out of Gen Z’s politics and sense of humor and has its roots in the actual experiences of girls and women, I think there’s an argument it’s actually symbolic of the generation’s—regardless of gender—exhaustion with overdone tropes and stories. This is just a generation that has seen every trick being pulled, and is no longer impressed by standard tropes, persuaded by the ethics of companies that they know to be inauthentic or trusting of brands pretending to care about them. My advice to brands? Treat your most discerning customers with respect. Try to understand their wants, their referential and gender-fluid world and, most importantly, who they are as individuals. They will return it in kind. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs

In the girl economy, marketers need to treat discerning Gen Z customers with respect

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