It’s still all about knowing your audience
03 April 2025
Are GenZ really that uninterested in the idea of a career? Cláudia Monteiro brings us the latest from the EFMD External Relations conference in Athens.
I’m just back from the 2025 EFMD External Relations conference and what a headline-packed event it was, featuring GenZ’s lack of interest in careers, the unpredictability of geopolitics boosted by Trumpism and, as ever, a sense that most of our social structures are singing to the drumbeat of polarisation.
Kantar’s recent intelligence on GenZ consumers speaks of a generation who are all about individual and authentic expression, eager to identify themselves in ever-changing fluid ways and looking for constant stimulation. Ideas like planning for the future are not important – enjoying the everyday is.
The question for higher education is, where do you meet GenZ? How do you prepare students for a career through softs skills development, experiential learning and exposure to organisations, with this – albeit oversimplified idea – that GenZ do not want a plan for themselves?
At CarringtonCrisp we host regular focus groups with GenZ prospective and current students and what we’ve learnt is way more nuanced that what the headlines will lead you to believe. What students tell us is that they look at working life as something that will involve a variety of paths – entrepreneurship being one possibility along the way. They want to learn in organisations for sure, but for many starting their own project is something they aspire to. Having meaningful work really matters to them. They hope universities will become places where they can be shown from day one the sorts of skills, networks and modus operandi that will tool them up for a fulfilling working life. They are asking for more role models in this space.
Florencia Lujani, co-founder of ACT Climate Labs, a brand agency working exclusively with sustainability issues reminded us at the conference how important it is to understand the nuanced behaviours and attitudes of your audience – to great effect.
Francesca carried deep dive qualitative research with a sample that represents the 69% of UK consumers who can be persuaded into sustainable choices but have been traditionally ignored by brands and policy. They’re now known as The Persuadables.
Turns out they are willing to change behaviour if we stop looking at them through the cultural divide (us, the snooty well-behaved progressives versus them, the traditionalists and conservatives who don’t care about the planet). And that’s what Florencia did, by travelling up and down the UK to have cups of tea with a cross-section of people who are willing to live more sustainably if the issues are connected to local choices, if they are normalised and demonstrably easy to fit into everyday life, and if these ideas are communicated with wide appeal.
By lifting the veil on The Persuadables, Climate ACT Labs offers something that’s become vital to marketing functions; data-driven evidence to guide plans and strategies. Here at CarringtonCrisp we celebrate just that; looking beyond the headlines and discovering the nuanced behaviours and attitudes of so many stakeholders across higher education.
Photo by Tim Mossholder