40% of gen z and millennials discover new products through influencers.

It’s another fantastic statistic to wrap your head around.

(and one that reminds me that I am neither a gen z or millennial as I mainly still discover new products through friends, family, neighbours and ads on Meta)

When I heard this spoken at the E-commerce Scotland event last week, it didn’t surprise me that the follow up advice to this position was – “meet your audience where they’re at”.

Now this was a good direction for the Marketers in the room trying to decide where to spend their precious marketing budgets.? With many media and “traditional” channels being cost-prohibitive or delivering diminishing returns on investment, then it’s a timely reminder that you need to be supremely careful on where you try to reach your customers.

Of course, that’s where I have a little bit of smugness working in branded merchandise, point of sale, workwear and webstore world.? Because the marketing investment in those categories is spent to reach customers in their world – the events they are at, the places they visit, the cafes they eat in, the bars they drink in, the boats they sail in – and, of course, the homes they live in.

The brands we represent as clients (and thank you to all of those who allow us that privilege) understand that the right merchandise (point of sale etc) will end up being part of their customers every day.? How cool is that?

The cooler part is that so many consumer brands we work with (particularly those with true brand fan following) have their customers crying out to get their hands on the merchandise. They want more touchpoints with the brand – not less. They believe in the brands so much that they want to show it in what they wear, carry, drink from, sit on etc.

I’ve not seen any groundbreaking influencing on branded merchandise yet but I’m now going to go look.

And in the meantime, I offer up this stat to balance out my earlier one relating to the younger gen.

80% of the top UK companies have a Gen X CEO.