What Gen Z Students Want From Brands

Walk onto any university campus today, and you’ll find a generation of shoppers who can spot a marketing gimmick from a mile away. Gen Z students, born roughly between 1997 and 2012, have grown up scrolling, swiping, and fact-checking in real time. They’ve watched brands rise and fall based on a single TikTok comment section, and they’ve learned to trust their own instincts over a polished ad campaign. For marketers trying to reach this audience, the old playbook of glossy hero shots and celebrity endorsements is losing its grip. What’s replacing it is a much simpler, harder-to-fake demand: be real.

Recent research backs this up in a big way. Over 70% of Gen Z say they prefer brands that feel authentic and relatable, a figure echoed across multiple independent studies from McKinsey, Deloitte, and student-focused researchers like UNiDAYS. That single number explains a lot about why some brands are thriving with young audiences while others, despite bigger budgets and bigger names, are struggling to land.

Authenticity Isn’t a Buzzword Anymore

McKinsey’s long-running research into this generation, often referred to as the “True Gen” studies, frames Gen Z’s defining trait as a search for truth, both personal and collective. Unlike millennials, who McKinsey characterised as consuming experiences, Gen Z’s core motivation is rooted in figuring out who they really are and aligning their choices, including their spending, with that identity. That search makes them allergic to anything that feels staged.

This shows up constantly in McKinsey’s consumer interviews. Researchers note that because young people now have instant access to information about a company’s internal practices, there’s nowhere left to hide. If a brand says one thing publicly and does another internally, that gap gets exposed almost immediately, often by the very community the brand was trying to court. A diversity statement posted during a heritage month means very little if the leadership team photo tells a different story, and Gen Z notices the discrepancy fast.

Deloitte’s Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey, now well into its second decade of fieldwork across dozens of countries, paints a similar picture from a different angle. Its most recent waves point to a generation that rewards brands that offer direct relationships and personalised content over slick, impersonal advertising. Micro-influencers, who feel like real people with real opinions, consistently outperform big-name celebrity endorsements at earning trust. One-to-one communication, whether through email, social DMs, or small community spaces, resonates far more than broadcast-style messaging aimed at everyone and no one in particular.

Students Want Substance, Not Slogans

It’s worth being precise about what “authenticity” actually means to this generation, because it’s not simply about humour or being trendy on social media. Survey data consistently show that traits like acting genuinely and demonstrating an understanding of everyday challenges rank far higher with Gen Z than being clever or entertaining. Wit and playfulness can help a brand stand out, but they rarely build the kind of loyalty that keeps a student coming back.

Interestingly, this generation is also more sceptical of brands that loudly declare they “stand for something” without backing it up. Plenty of Gen Z consumers say it matters less whether a brand makes a big public statement and more whether its everyday operations actually reflect the values it claims to hold. In other words, substance has to show up in the supply chain, the hiring practices, and the customer service experience, not just in a caption.

UNiDAYS, which works directly with millions of verified students across the UK, US, and beyond, has built an entire research practice around this nuance. Its surveys and focus groups consistently surface a generation that can tell the difference between a brand genuinely trying to connect and one simply chasing a youth-marketing checkbox. Sponsored partnerships and influencer collaborations that feel forced get called out quickly in student communities, while ones that feel like a natural fit are far more likely to translate into an actual purchase. As one piece of UNiDAYS-backed research on student focus groups put it, the partnerships have to make sense, because students can sniff out a forced collaboration almost instantly.

Value, but Not at the Expense of Values

None of this means Gen Z students have unlimited budgets or are indifferent to price. Quite the opposite. Many are juggling tuition, part-time work, and rising living costs, and discounts genuinely matter to them. UNiDAYS research on student shopping behaviour has found that a discount needs to be meaningfully sized, generally upward of 15 to 20%, before it actually changes purchasing behaviour, and that exclusivity for students sweetens the deal further. Brands that offer a genuine student discount program, rather than a token gesture, tend to build much stronger loyalty with this audience over time.

But price sensitivity and values-driven spending aren’t mutually exclusive for this generation. Multiple studies, including McKinsey’s, have found that a majority of Gen Z consumers are still willing to pay a premium for products from companies they perceive as sustainable or ethical, even while watching their budgets closely elsewhere. The calculation students are making isn’t simply about who’s cheapest. It’s about who deserves their limited dollars, and that decision increasingly factors in a brand’s environmental footprint, labour practices, and overall transparency.

Meeting Them Where They Actually Are

Another myth worth retiring is the idea that Gen Z only exists online. Research from UNiDAYS and others has repeatedly found that despite being digital natives, a large share of this generation still prefers shopping in physical stores, still values face-to-face interaction with brands, and still uses email as a primary way to reach out with questions. Deloitte’s recent retail research describes Gen Z as perhaps the most genuinely omnichannel generation yet, blending digital discovery with a strong, ongoing preference for the in-person shopping experience. Brands that treat digital and physical as separate strategies, rather than one connected experience, are missing a real opportunity with this audience.

Social platforms remain enormously influential for discovery, certainly. TikTok and Instagram are often where a student first hears about a product. But the actual decision to buy is shaped by a mix of signals, friend recommendations, in-store browsing, reviews, and a brand’s broader reputation, not just a single viral video.

What This Means for Brands Trying to Reach Students

Pulling these threads together, a clear picture emerges of what wins with Gen Z students. They want brands that communicate like real people rather than corporate press releases. They want consistency between what a company says publicly and what it actually does, whether that’s sustainability claims, diversity commitments, or customer treatment. They want partnerships and influencer content that feel organic rather than transactional. And they want genuine value, both in price and in purpose, delivered through channels that respect how they actually shop, both online and off.

None of this requires a brand to chase every trend or pretend to be something it isn’t. If anything, the research suggests the opposite: trying too hard to seem cool or relevant is often what backfires. The brands earning long-term loyalty from Gen Z students aren’t necessarily the flashiest. They’re the ones being transparent about who they are, consistent in how they show up, and willing to have a real, two-way conversation with the young people they’re hoping to reach.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

It’s also worth pointing out what happens when brands miss the mark. Gen Z’s willingness to walk away from a brand is well documented. A meaningful share of young consumers report that they’ve actually stopped buying from companies after spotting practices that didn’t match the brand’s public messaging, whether that was a sustainability claim that didn’t hold up or a social cause campaign that felt opportunistic. Trust, once lost with this generation, is genuinely hard to rebuild, partly because the same social platforms that helped a brand go viral for the right reasons can just as easily amplify the wrong ones.

This is part of why so many of the brands cited as Gen Z success stories share a common thread: they were willing to be specific rather than vague. Concrete sustainability targets with real dates outperform open-ended promises. Showing the actual people behind a product, rather than a polished brand voice with no face attached, tends to land better than a perfectly art-directed campaign. None of this is particularly flashy advice, and that’s somewhat the point. Gen Z students aren’t asking brands to be more entertaining. They’re asking them to be more honest.

For a generation raised to question everything it sees online, that kind of steady, demonstrable honesty isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s the baseline expectation, and the data, from McKinsey’s long-running consumer research to Deloitte’s global surveys to UNiDAYS’ work with millions of students directly, point in the same direction. Brands that treat authenticity as a genuine operating principle rather than a marketing layer are the ones building real relationships with this generation. Those that don’t are increasingly being left behind, often quietly, as students simply take their attention and their spending elsewhere.