The Lazy Attribution: I Promise You, Not Everything Trending Is Gen Z

There’s a lazy habit I see in marketing, slapping a Gen Z label on anything with momentum. And I mean anything. Dance routines, slang, nail art, sound bites, style cues. If it’s fast-moving, culturally fluent, or even mildly chaotic, someone will call it Gen Z. Let’s take slang, for example. Half the time, what’s being referenced isn’t Gen Z at all, it’s AAVE. Or ballroom slang. And if you cross the Atlantic to end up in London, a lot of slang can be traced to a concoction of Jamaican patois with a twist of African pidgin.

A lot of what gets credited to Gen Z wasn’t created by them. And while influence travels, credit still matters. Especially when you’re getting paid to understand where things come from. Let's do the real work and dig deep.

Gen Z might be the amplification layer. But they’re not always the source.