The Audience You're Calling Gen Z Doesn't Exist

Why dentsu’s own research proves that “Gen Z consumer behaviour” is a contradiction in terms

Dentsu published a solid piece of consumer research earlier this year. “Gen Z Consumer Behaviour in 2026: Value, Trust and Community Are Reshaping Spend.” It draws on their Consumer Navigator data, insights from their VIZ employee resource group, and perspectives from TikTok, Channel 4, and Michael Kors. The research is genuine. The data is real. The recommendations are sensible.

The frame is wrong.

And here is the kicker: dentsu’s own article contains the evidence that proves it. In the closing paragraph, the author writes that “Gen Z behaviours rarely stay contained to one generation” and that behaviour is “harder to predict through age alone.”

Read those two sentences again. If the behaviours aren’t generational, and age is a poor predictor, then the entire premise of the article, that these are “Gen Z” behaviours, collapses. Not because I say so. Because dentsu’s own data says so.

Let me show you what happens when you take the same data and read it through the right lens.

The Four Behaviours, Re-Read Through Mindsets

Dentsu identifies four key behavioural patterns among Gen Z consumers in 2026. Each one is real and important. None of them belongs to a generation.

1. Value-switching: “48% of Gen Z are more likely to switch brands after the Budget”

Dentsu frames this as a generational shift in loyalty. Young people are less brand-loyal, more fluid, more willing to switch when value changes. The data point is accurate. The attribution is wrong.

This is Adventurer behaviour. The Adventurer mindset, one of the four fundamental orientations in the STAR Framework, is driven by autonomy and novelty. Adventurers of any age optimise for the best available option, not for the familiar one. They switch gyms when a better one opens. They change banks when the app is smoother. They try the new restaurant instead of returning to the old favourite.

A 50-year-old Adventurer is just as likely to switch brands when the value equation shifts. The reason this shows up more strongly in younger consumers isn’t because they’re young. It’s because younger consumers have less accumulated brand inertia. They haven’t spent twenty years building habits around particular products. They have fewer switching costs (no mortgage-linked insurance, no loyalty-accumulated air miles, no brand-entrenched workplace pension). The psychology is the same. The constraint is circumstantial.

If you build a “Gen Z switching strategy,” you reach the Adventurers in Gen Z. You miss the Realists, who are staying put because stability matters more than marginal value gains. And you miss the Adventurers in every other generation who would switch tomorrow if you gave them a reason.

2. Community-led discovery: “61% of Gen Z say social media is better than traditional retail for discovering new products”

This is Socialiser behaviour. The Socialiser mindset is driven by relatedness. Socialisers of any age discover through people, not through broadcast. They trust peer recommendations over expert reviews. They value the experience of people like them over the authority of people above them.

The platform changed. That’s all. My mother gets product recommendations from her WhatsApp group. My neighbour asks the local Facebook group which plumber to use. My colleague swears by TripAdvisor reviews for every hotel booking. These are all community-led discovery behaviours. They look exactly like what dentsu describes in Gen Z. The difference is TikTok versus the village green, not 1997 versus 1965.

The Socialiser in Gen Z discovers through creators and algorithms. The Socialiser in Gen X discovers through Facebook groups and word of mouth. The Socialiser in the Boomer generation discovers through the golf club and the church coffee morning. Same drive. Same mechanism. Different channel.

If you build a “Gen Z discovery strategy” around social media, you’re optimising for the channel, not the psychology. And you’re building for a channel that will change in eighteen months while the psychology stays the same.

3. Transparency demands: “Gen Z have grown up in an environment where they are constantly exposed to information… that exposure has made them more sceptical”

This is Thinker behaviour. The Thinker mindset is driven by competence and accuracy. Thinkers of any age audit before they trust. They want demonstrations, evidence, real-world use cases. They are disproportionately sensitive to undisclosed commercial relationships, not because they’re digitally native, but because they are epistemically rigorous.

Dentsu reports that 32% of Gen Z say explainer-style content directly influences their purchase decisions. That’s not a generational statistic. That’s a Thinker statistic. Thinkers in every generation want to understand how something works before they commit. They read the specifications. They watch the unboxing video. They check the ingredients. The format of the verification changes (YouTube review vs Consumer Reports vs a conversation with the shopkeeper), but the drive is identical.

The article quotes Harry Bond, a content creator at dentsu Creative: “What makes me fall in love with a brand is transparency.” That’s a Thinker speaking. And Thinkers are born in every decade.

4. Optimism under pressure: “35% of Gen Z feel more confident about spending following the Budget, far outpacing older generations”

Dentsu calls this a “distinctive economic mindset.” It is distinctive, but it’s not generational. It’s motivational.

This pattern, high optimism despite financial pressure, is the signature of the Adventurer mindset combined with lower accumulated financial obligation. Adventurers are promotion-focused. They are oriented toward growth, opportunity, and what’s possible. Under stress, they lean forward, not back. They experiment. They explore. They treat constraint as a puzzle, not a wall.

A 45-year-old Adventurer with disposable income shows the same pattern. They’ll invest in a new business idea during a downturn, switch careers when the market is uncertain, or take on a renovation project when interest rates are rising. The optimism isn’t naive. It’s structural. It’s how the Adventurer mindset processes threat: as opportunity in disguise.

The reason it clusters in younger consumers is that younger consumers are more likely to be Adventurers with fewer financial anchors. Not because Adventurers are young. Because young Adventurers have less to lose.

The Paragraph That Gives the Game Away

Here is dentsu’s closing paragraph in full:

“Gen Z behaviours rarely stay contained to one generation. Many of the patterns explored here (fluid loyalty, community-led discovery and rising expectations around transparency) are already appearing more broadly across the market. Understanding Gen Z is therefore less about youth marketing in isolation and more about recognising the growing importance of intergenerational perspectives in shaping how brands connect, design and grow.”

This is a remarkable admission. Dentsu is saying, in the final paragraph of an article about Gen Z, that the behaviours aren’t actually contained to Gen Z. That they’re appearing across all generations. That age alone is a poor predictor.

Which raises the obvious question: then why is the entire article structured around a generational label?

The answer is that “Gen Z” is a marketing category that sells. It gets clicks. It fills conference sessions. It justifies specialist agencies and dedicated budget lines. It creates a sense of urgency: “You need a Gen Z strategy or you’re falling behind.” That urgency drives revenue for the agencies selling the strategy.

I’m not suggesting dentsu is being cynical. I think they genuinely believe in the generational frame. But the structure of the marketing industry rewards generational thinking, even when the data points away from it. The result is a strange disconnect where the research team produces data that contradicts the framing, and the framing wins because it’s more commercially useful than the truth.

The truth is that dentsu’s research describes four human behavioural patterns that exist across all ages, and the most useful thing a brand could do with that data is stop asking “How do we reach Gen Z?” and start asking “How do we reach people who discover through community, switch when value shifts, demand transparency, and stay optimistic under pressure?”

That audience isn’t a generation. It’s a combination of mindsets. And it’s significantly larger than Gen Z.

What a Psychographic Brief Would Look Like

If you rewrote dentsu’s recommendations through a mindset lens instead of a generational one, the strategy doesn’t change dramatically. The targeting does. And that’s the point.

Instead of “Make value easy to evaluate for Gen Z”: Build value clarity for the Realist in every generation. The Realist needs transparent pricing, visible benefits, and clear comparison points. They’re 22 and they’re 62. The format (comparison tools, price-match guarantees, clear breakdowns) works for both.

Instead of “Be present in the spaces where Gen Z discover brands”: Build community presence for the Socialiser in every generation. The Socialiser discovers through people. That might be TikTok for a 20-year-old and a Facebook group for a 50-year-old. The strategy is the same: be where the conversations are, participate rather than broadcast, earn trust through presence.

Instead of “Prioritise useful content for Gen Z”: Build demonstration content for the Thinker in every generation. Explainer videos, real-world use cases, evidence-based claims. The Thinker wants to understand before they commit. They’re reading the review on their phone at 25 and on their desktop at 55. The content format is the same.

Instead of “Maintain commercial transparency for Gen Z”: Build authentic partnerships for the Adventurer in every generation. The Adventurer detects performance and rejects it. They want brands that feel genuine, not staged. They’re 19 and they’re 49. The tone that works for one works for the other.

You don’t need four generational strategies. You need one mindset strategy, executed across channels that different mindsets naturally inhabit.

The Real Leading Indicator

Dentsu calls Gen Z “a leading indicator for the wider market.” They’re right, but not for the reason they think.

The leading indicator isn’t “what young people do.” It’s “what people do when the old structures fall away.”

When brand loyalty erodes because information is universally available, switching behaviour rises. For everyone. When broadcast discovery is replaced by community discovery because algorithms surface peer content, Socialisers of all ages shift. When institutional trust declines because institutions have repeatedly broken trust, Thinkers of all ages demand transparency. When the old employment contract dissolves and people can no longer rely on stable career paths, Adventurers of all ages lean into optimism and experimentation.

Gen Z didn’t invent these behaviours. They’re the first generation to express them without the scaffolding that suppressed them in previous generations. Remove the scaffolding from anyone, at any age, and the same human operating system emerges.

That’s what the STAR Framework maps. Not generations. The human operating system. Four fundamental motivational drives, present in every human being, expressed differently depending on context but unchanged in their architecture.

Dentsu’s research is good. The data is valuable. The recommendations are sound. But the most important insight in the entire article is the one the author didn’t realise she was making: that the behaviours she describes aren’t generational at all. They’re human. And treating them as human, rather than as young, is the difference between a strategy that works for a narrowing demographic and one that works for the entire market.

The audience you’re calling Gen Z doesn’t exist. The mindsets you’re describing do. Build for those instead.

David Chadderton is the creator of the STAR Framework, author of The STAR Framework: Rewriting The Rules of Consumer Engagement (2025 NYC Big Book Award winner), and Chief Marketing Officer at Homes for Students and VervLife. He writes The Unoptimised Human on Substack.