Today's college students hold significant influence over their parents' buying behaviors. Instead of marketing directly to older demographics, CPG brands can achieve greater success by targeting Gen Z on platforms like TikTok, prompting them to recommend products to their parents.

To connect with Gen Z, Coach shifted its brand positioning from simply being an affordable luxury good to being a tool for self-expression. This move addresses a core tension for this generation: the desire to express their true selves while navigating the pressures of constant social media visibility.

Coach transformed its growth strategy by shifting from retaining loyal customers to acquiring new ones at market entry. By aiming to be the "first luxury bag" for the 25 million women who turn 18 each year, they redefined their total addressable market from incremental share gains to a massive, recurring opportunity.

By initially focusing on unbranded fashion and beauty, Shopee attracted female consumers who tend to buy more frequently and write more product reviews. This behavior accelerated platform trust and improved logistics efficiency in its early days.

Gen Z consumers curate different personas across various social channels (e.g., TikTok vs. LinkedIn), making brand positioning exponentially more complex. A brand's purpose must serve as a connective tissue, agile enough to be tweaked for different channel-specific identities while maintaining a core consistency.

EBay's acquisition of Depop from Etsy for $1.2 billion highlights the platform's critical importance in the Gen Z market. Depop has become a dominant commerce hub where this demographic lives and buys, particularly for vintage and used clothing. This move solidifies it as a vital platform for marketers targeting young consumers.

Focusing on a customer's mindset and shared values (a psychographic) rather than their age (a demographic) allows a brand to appeal to a wider audience. M.M. LaFleur successfully sells to professional women from their late 20s to their late 50s by targeting a shared professional identity.

To land major retailers like Target, Waterboy focused on incrementality. They showed how their strong social presence and differentiated product would attract a new, younger Gen Z demographic to the store, increasing the retailer's overall category sales, not just replacing an existing product.

The market appears to be valuing Celsius based on the maturing growth of its core brand (~6%), while largely ignoring the high-growth trajectory of its newly acquired Alani brand. This singular focus creates a valuation disconnect, as Alani is a key driver of the company's overall forecasted 18% forward growth.