What is brat summer? Why is Kamala Harris using it to reach the younger generation? How can brands do the same? We know it’s nearly brat autumn at this point, but fear not, your local youth correspondent is here to answer all your questions.
Charli XCX’s album, Brat, has been a huge success – especially with a Gen-Z audience. Now we’ve seen Kamala Harris’ team jumping on the trend and voter registrations have skyrocketed – 85% of which are in the under 35s category.
How has one album had this big of an impact?
The shift from Millennials to Gen-Z
To understand it, you have to understand the Gen-Z internet culture and how it differs from that of the millennials. Since I was born in 1998, I’m what some people call a ‘zillennial’ – I’m technically Gen Z but old enough that I was raised by millennial internet culture. I think that puts me in a good place to explain.
Millennials were the first group of young people to be raised on the internet and social media. And when you think of that era, you might think of carefully-curated Instagram feeds with hashtags on every post, heavily-filtered selfies, homes decorated in an all-white, minimalist style and YouTube vlogs. People put in effort to how they presented themselves online, and it showed.
Then Gen-Z came along. And with the rise of TikTok during the pandemic, we started to see a shift. Green kitchens replaced white kitchens, maximalism replaced minimalism, silly photo dumps replaced posed selfies. We pretty much did the opposite of what the millennials were doing.
But does that mean we stopped caring about what people thought of us and how we looked on the internet? Of course not. No matter what generation you are, young people will always be a little self-conscious. Instead, the Gen-Z aesthetic involves putting a lot of effort into seeming effortless.
That’s where Brat’s success comes from. It’s all about this chaotic, messy-in-the-right-way lifestyle. And that appeals to Gen-Z. Even the branding – the one word on a vomit green background in a grainy Arial font – looks like it’s just been thrown together, when in reality there was a whole team behind it.
So if we know how the Gen-Z brand should look, how should it sound? We’ve been calling it ‘The no-makeup-makeup tone of voice’.
There’s only one rule: it can’t look like it’s been written by a copywriter. It’s a reaction against Apple’s dramatic headlines, Nike’s inspirational stories, the Economist’s witty headlines.
It’s light, it’s human, it’s rough round the edges, but above all it feels completely real – like something you’d actually say.
How are brands doing this?
Here are a few examples of brands hitting the nail on the head:
Surreal: Heard of this Insta thing?@eat_surreal Have a look, it might take off
Aldi: Happy #WorldSnakeDay to everyone who’s ever handed us a lawsuit x
Monzo: COMPLETELY VALID REASONS TO BE ANNOYED AT WORK
– My laptop is slow (I have 74 tabs open)
– No-one asked me how my evening was (I told them anyway)
– There are no free meeting rooms (I didn’t bother trying to book one until last minute)
We’ve worked with two of these brands, so we know our stuff. If you wanna be bumpin’ that*, slide in our DMs.
*Tone of voice, of course.
Written by Ashleigh Thompson, Writer at Definition.