The Gen Z Reset
My argument was that Gen Z would reshape healthcare communications — expecting emotional intelligence, cultural fluency and radical honesty from brands, seeing health holistically, and spotting inauthenticity instantly. I framed this as both a creative challenge (tone, format, platform) and a relationship challenge, recommending tone-of-voice systems rooted in emotional intelligence, partnerships with Gen Z-trusted creators, and a shift from one-way patient education to ongoing relationship built on truth over polish.
What actually happened
I stand by the substance of the argument — the behaviours I described are real and growing more pronounced. But with twelve months of hindsight, here's what I got wrong: I attributed them too specifically to a generation. The evidence now shows these behaviours are market-wide:
Digital fatigue is cross-generational. Deloitte’s 2025 UK data shows that while 29% of Gen Z deleted a social media app, 20% of all consumers did the same. Half of all UK consumers turned off app notifications. These behaviours go further than Gen Z alone.
Institutional mistrust is everywhere. The erosion of trust in institutions — a trend I framed as distinctly Gen Z — has continued to widen across demographics. The shift from institutional trust to peer trust, from brand authority to community authority, is not a generational phenomenon. It’s a structural one.
The attention economy is collapsing for everyone. Adobe reports that half of all customers give promotional content 2–5 seconds. Reuters Institute found that 79% of adults don’t receive news alerts in an average week, and 43% have actively disabled them. This is a whole-market bandwidth problem, rather than a Gen Z problem.
Putting labels aside, the useful part of my 2025 Gen Z thesis was the early signal detection. Gen Z were the canary in the coal mine for behaviours that would spread to every audience. The mistake was framing it as a generational insight rather than a leading indicator.
What this means now
If you built a Gen Z strategy in 2025, the good news is that most of it now applies to your entire audience. The bad news is that calling it a "Gen Z strategy" limits how broadly you can deploy it.
The reframe: instead of "how do we speak to Gen Z?" ask "how do we design for people who are cognitively depleted, institutionally sceptical, and actively managing their digital intake?" That's the market.
For healthcare: this is particularly important because HCPs are experiencing the same bandwidth collapse. Physicians managing patient volumes, administrative burden and information overload from multiple channels aren't behaving like a neat demographic segment. They're behaving like overwhelmed people. Design for that.
Verdict: Absorbed
The prediction was substantively correct but demographically mislabelled. The signal was real; the framing was too narrow. The behaviours I attributed to Gen Z are now the defining characteristics of the entire market. Which, from a strategic standpoint, makes them more important, not less.