When it comes to branding, setting your sights on Gen Z can feel like a fool's errand. With ever-shifting trends, a bottomless pit of social media platforms, and the continuous fight for cultural relevance, it's easy to believe that resonating with the digital generation is impossible – but for Tumisha Balogun, it's all a matter of perspective.
As the co-founder of social-first creative agency Tag, Tumisha leads with a passion for engaging younger audiences through co-creation, participation and cultural insight. To uncover more about the secret to reaching new gen audiences, I caught up with Tumisha to discuss what brands are getting wrong, the value of a social-first strategy and the key to creating authentic work that speaks, rather than performs, to the new generation.
How has Gen Z changed the branding world?
First, they've compressed everything. Trends, aesthetics, brand voices, the lifespan of all of it has collapsed. The problem is that most boardrooms are still operating on a cycle built for a slower world, and that gap is only getting wider.
Second, they're defiant. The access has shifted so dramatically that someone can build a creative identity from a phone and a point of view. You used to need years of training, the right equipment, the right room. Now that's optional. That defiance of the willingness to make something out of nothing has genuinely changed who gets to be in the room. And honestly, it's made the industry more interesting.
What are brands getting wrong when reaching out to younger audiences?
There is a dissolving connection between age and social expectation. Historically, age came with a strict social script. In the mid-1970s, 77% of UK women were married by 25 today; that figure has flipped entirely, with the average age of marriage now sitting at 33. Fundamentally, too many brands are making assumptions about age based on out-of-date attitudes. When they are speaking to and trying to reach younger audiences, they don’t look at the wider picture (like the political state), and the things that have forced young people to grow up more quickly in some ways, but in other ways stay as children longer. The rules have changed completely.
Too many brands are making assumptions about age based on out-of-date attitudes.
They came of age through a pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, and a political climate that demanded they carry things no young person should have to. Politically aware, emotionally literate, instinctively sceptical of institutions. And yet, the average age of a first-time buyer is now 34. This is a generation grown-up in every way that asks something of them, and young in every way that would give something back. That contradiction doesn't resolve into a consumer insight. Brands keep trying to flatten it into one anyway.
The second failure is the singular young person. The monolithic Gen Z. Brands spend enormous energy decoding young people from a distance – trend reports, social listening, insight decks built by people who've never been in the rooms where culture actually moves. But the deeper problem isn't methodology. It's self-awareness. We live in such a little bubble in comparison to the rest of the world. Nobody's right or wrong; we all bring our own lenses to the things we consume, while mistaking our view for reality. We confuse our bubble with the world, when in fact it is only one version among billions. The marketing director, the strategist, the researcher building the deck are not neutral observers. They are people with a particular vantage point who have confused proximity to culture with understanding of it.
The alternative isn't complicated. Work with young people directly, not as research subjects, but as creative collaborators and co-authors of the work. The difference between a brand that gets it and one that performs getting it is almost always traceable to that. One built the thing with people who actually think it's cool. The other asked someone what cool meant and guessed from there.
What tropes are you sick of seeing when it comes to Gen Z branding?
I'm so tired of nostalgia-baiting. Why are brands constantly pulling us into the past? There's a reason it works: emotional resonance drives revenue, and tapping into memory creates connection. But I wrote about this in my Substack piece on the Nostalgia Trap: philosophers like Rousseau saw nostalgia as a yearning for lost purity, an idealised past untouched by modern complexity. And I think brands have weaponised exactly that feeling.
When I saw the 2026 vs 2016 reflection trend sweep through, I didn't see joy; sadly, I saw a cry for help. Sounds dramatic, but the world is dark right now, and instead of meeting people in that, brands are pulling on the insecurity of it. That's not a connection. That's exploitation.
How can brands build authenticity with younger audiences?
Stop measuring everything. Reach still feels super relevant for no reason, and I don't understand why. Even when brands say it’s not, they still measure it. We're all drunk on a false sense of certainty, data that proves very little but feels like proof.
Authenticity isn't and can't be a deliverable
There's a concept called Goodhart's Law that basically says the moment something becomes a target, it stops being useful as a measure. That's exactly what happens when brands try to quantify culture. The metric takes over, the nuance disappears, and you end up with a team tweaking thumbnails when the real problem is that they were never truly embedded in the culture to begin with. A campaign we recently did with V&A East to launch The Music Is Black is a good example of the opposite. The goal wasn't to measure how many young people they could reach; it was set out to create a feeling. And that shift in intention changed everything about how we made it.
Authenticity isn't and can't be a deliverable. You can't reverse-engineer it from a dashboard. The brands that get it right are the ones that stopped trying to measure it and started actually being present in the spaces, conversations, and communities they claim to care about.
Why is a social-first brand strategy so valuable today?
Social-first is one of those terms that gets flattened into "make content and post it." But that's not what it means, or at least, it's not what it should mean. It's about understanding where people actually are. And increasingly, that's not on a brand's Instagram grid. It's in WhatsApp groups, Close Friends lists, IG private pages, Reddit threads. The smaller, quieter spaces.
The reason those spaces matter so much right now is pretty human. People are lonelier than ever, and the cost of living has made even the simple act of going out feel inaccessible. So people are building communities online, not performing for an audience, but actually connecting. At TAG, we've built a Close Friends infrastructure for exactly that reason because the most valuable social real estate right now isn't public, it's private. Brands that understand that shift stop thinking about reach and start thinking about belonging. And that's a completely different creative brief.
What is broken about the current entry-level pipeline for underrepresented talent, and how can it be fixed?
AI is making it harder to hire for junior roles because so many of them are being systemised out of existence. But there's a secondary problem: it's also making it nearly impossible to identify genuine talent anymore. When every application sounds like it was written by the same machine, you lose the signal entirely. Nobody is thinking on paper anymore, and that's a real loss.
But the thing I don't hear enough people talking about is this: entry-level talent from underrepresented backgrounds is often incredibly creative, but they haven't been taught how to navigate corporate infrastructure. They don't know the systems, the unspoken rules, the way things work inside institutions. And when they make mistakes, not creative mistakes, just operational ones, they get blacklisted. A door that was barely open closes completely. That's not a talent problem. That's a structural failure. The system is punishing people for not knowing things nobody taught them.
The fix isn't just about opening doors; it's about actually supporting people once they're through them. Letting them be creative while also giving them the scaffolding to understand how to operate. That balance is rare, but it's the only thing that actually works.
