Morning Consult has been working on inaugural Gen Z’s Favourite Brands report based on the company’s brand intelligence platform, which polls consumers about more than 4,000 brands and products daily. It launched this week.
Data for this report was pulled from surveys conducted May 1–August 21, including an average of ~2,000 Gen Z adult respondents—those born between 1997 and 2004—per brand.
Want to hear a shocker? TikTok didn’t even make the top 40 despite tech companies earning top slots. YouTube on the other hand clocked 86% favorability with Gen Z adults, meaning that share said they have a “somewhat” or “very” favourable opinion of the brand. Google ranked at No. 2 with 84% favorability, followed by Netflix at 82% and Amazon at 80%.
TikTok scored 69% favorability among Gen Zers, lower than many other brands on Gen Z’s list of faves. But it’s more popular among this group than it is with the general public and the generation just above them.
- 39% of US adults said they have a favourable view of TikTok.
- 54% of millennials said the same.
A surprising winner was snack and chocolate brand M&Ms which came in at No. 5 with 80% favorability among all Gen Z adults. The snack brand is more popular among women than men, so perhaps its marketing team had that in mind when it announced its latest character, Purple, the first female peanut M&M. As a member of Gen Z myself I wondered why this is. The same type of ad has run for years, M&Ms at family barbecues and we all remember that weird one where a woman is caught cheating on her husband with M&Ms in what looks like a hotel bed. Is it the nostalgia that strikes a chord? They also have quite a y2k feel (I remember them appearing in a few rom coms from the 2000s, The Wedding Planner with JLo comes to mind) and with that style massively in trend for my generation I question whether this motivated the brand’s popularity.
Doritos, KitKat, Oreo, Gatorade, Cheetos, Sprite, Pringles, and Capri Sun also made the top 40. Is the overall takeaway that we consume too much sugar?
