2PM - No. 395: The "Adorkable" Gen Z

Bloomberg: "Generation Z, you’re adorkable"

Brands: While most boomer brands approach “the socials” with the cumbersome predation of Humbert Humbert, Gen Z is genuinely and joyfully Lolita-esque — not just on social media but of it. As a result, adorkables must perfect a social persona that embeds their products while evading any hint of effort. It’s no accident that adorkable Instagram accounts — in addition to jokes, memes and political statements — are studded with real photos of real consumers using their brands in real life. Especially when, according to a 2019 Morning Consult survey, 11% of American Gen Z’s consider themselves to be social media influencers.

While I am not a fan of "adorkable" as a blanding antonym, there is interesting insight in this Bloomberg report. Pay attention to how brands are beginning to pattern visuals and voice for a consumer that thinks differently. And it's a profitable proposition: 

Nearly 27% of Americans (and growing) fall within the birth years of Generation Z, a demographic that is of critical importance to legacy retailers and DTC brands, alike. In China, a country often measured as a leading indicator for American commerce trends, Generation Z leads in luxury retail adoption. In America, Generation Z is awaiting the opportunity to buy with the frequency of Millennials and Generation X. The data suggests that their consumer activity will trump that of previous generations. While Millennials prefer DTC brands by a margin of just 4% over traditional retailers, Generation Z prefers these online-born brands to their legacy counterparts by over 40-45%. [1]

2PM Data: But it's not all adorkable and "Gen Z" in DTC land, here are the top performing brands for this week. To see the rest of the list of 461 retailers, go here.

What is NBA Top Shot? Blockchain NBA highlight market explodes

Linear Commerce / Darren Rovell: The skyrocketing sports card market took a back seat this week to a company that sells NBA highlights. The buyers don’t own the highlight — the NBA does — but the fans do own the limited edition numbered version of it, which they can collect, trade and sell.

Greg Bettinelli: Tracking @nba_topshot digital trading card (moments) activity in real-time. Today, trending ~$125k in GMV (gross merchandise value traded) per 30 mins (11:30am PT). Perspective, that's ~ $5M/day, $150M per month, $1.8B per year. Likely, fastest marketplace growth ever seen before. [2]

A deep dive of the NBA Top Shot craze will be included in Friday's Member Brief. 

The tail of how a DTC lobster company clawed to growth

DTC Brands / AdExchanger: The decade-old lobster-by-mail business experienced hockey-stick growth because CEO Mark Murrell took a big risk last March. As millions of Americans sheltered in place, business picked up. So Murrell decided to “pour gasoline on the fire” and spend money on advertising like never before.

Baby boomers, to retailers' surprise, are dominating online shopping

eCommerce / Washington Post: As baby boomers move online, retailers and consumer goods brands are scrambling to meet them there with round-the-clock customer service, detailed nutrition information and interactive videos aimed at simplifying e-commerce for the uninitiated. Instacart, the nation’s largest online grocery provider, has created a service that helps older consumers set up accounts, fill their carts and place their first orders.

Editor's Note: This is a repost from Friday's Member Brief. It was one of the most shared across social media channels. 

China's new interest in niche Western beauty

Beauty / Vogue Business: One of the more straightforward ways for Western beauty brands to enter the Chinese market and test the waters is collaborating with popular eCommerce platforms like Alibaba’s Tmall, as these platforms give easy access to millions of Chinese consumers.

How Supreme and Nike cracked the auction market

Veblen Goods / Wall Street Journal: Doug Woodham, the managing partner of Art Fiduciary Advisors, an art consulting firm, noted that the sneaker-reselling site StockX, launched in 2016, convinced many potential investors that reselling sneakers could yield profits. StockX’s data-rich interface showed that even widely released Air Max shoes could sell for three times their sticker price, while rarer sneakers could bring far bigger windfalls.

A format for brand audit

Practical Brand / Ana Andjelic: To audit a brand in order to set it on a right growth path, I devised a series of questions, grouped in five areas: Business, Brand, Category, Consumer and Culture. The objective of a brand audit is to provide information on the unique business, consumer and cultural environment that a brand operates in.

This is the single most important page on the web

Sociology / Hunter Walk: I was thinking about this earlier today and my initial framing was “what page performs the most complex task that I couldn’t do myself,” imagining that optimizing for absolute computing power would be the right angle. It took me a minute or two but I realized this was completely backwards and that I should be trying to figure out what content would be most impactful upon a different type of computing power, namely my own brain. That flip led me back to a page that I absolutely love, and try to visit quarterly or so, when I want to laugh at myself: Wikipedia’s List of Cognitive Biases.

Editor's Note: Hunter mentioned that this newsletter has too many words, so this edition is slightly shorter. 

The business of influence with MKBHD

The Passion Economy / The Verge: [Brownlee] started the channel MKBHD in 2009 when he was just a teenager making videos about his new HP laptop. Since then, he’s grown it to one of the biggest tech channels on YouTube, with 13.5 million subscribers, a podcast, and a growing support team.

Unlocked for the entire community: Set aside partisanship for a moment. With each new administration, things change. With each election cycle, the anticipation of those changes can make the difference between success and failure.

Change isn’t always gradual. In 2019, we passed the centennial anniversary of the end of the Spanish Flu. All the while, we were preparing for our own ghastly pandemic. It was a tumultuous time, then and now.

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