Without your audience in the room, your brand is guesswork

A group of experienced executives is discussing how the brand can “connect with Gen Z.” Everyone has a deck and an opinion. But nobody in the room is Gen Z. I’ve sat in this type of meeting more times than I’d like to admit. We collect demographic reports, analyze trends, and increasingly ask AI to tell us who our audiences are and what they want. But this goes wrong when we allow it to replace conversations. A generation is not a community. A community is not an individual. People born in...