A Gen Z Favorite Giving Spots the Star Treatment
While millennial aesthetics are all about minimalism, neutral color palettes, and perfectly balanced visuals, Gen Z has done a complete 180°. Gen Z brands’ are bold, eclectic, and just a little bit imperfect.
Gen Zs are unapologetically who they are. With self-expression as a core part of their identity, they demand the same authenticity from their brands. They want to see flaws celebrated, and are champions of dialing down on airbrushing and showing real people instead.
Communicating to Gen Z involves a vibrant and contrasting color palette, and speaking to them in their own language. There’s also a little nod to nostalgia as well, with this generation embracing styles and aesthetics from the past (Y2K, retro, and 2012 Tumblr era) and putting their own twist on it.
The beauty industry has been one of the first to pivot and build out Gen Z-focused brand strategies, and cult-favorite Starface is a prime example of a brand that has mastered the art.
Starface captured the hearts and minds of Gen Zs with its line of star-shaped pimple stickers in a myriad of colors. Unlike the hydrocolloid acne protectors we’d seen in the past, which were designed to blend into the color of the wearer’s skin, these stickers were always meant to stand out.
For what seems like a simple acne sticker, the concept is pretty revolutionary. Almost everyone deals with pimples at some point in their lives, but for whatever reason, it’s always been seen as a source of shame for teenagers (and adults). People spent their entire self-care budgets trying to figure out how to get rid of, reduce and conceal these blemishes, but here was Starface coming in and completely flipping the switch on this narrative. Instead of encouraging someone to hide their acne, they award a “gold star” for every time they had one.
Aside from encouraging skin positivity, the brand has taken a stance on tackling other outdated stigmas. They selected American football player and a first-round draft pick for the New York Giants, Kayvon Thibodeaux, as a spokesperson and partner. Thibodeaux announced the partnership with an Instagram post captioned, “Unapologetic self expression is something I personally believe in and I hope to bring that message to my community with @Starface . I’m Excited to be apart of the Team !!!”
A prominent male athlete working with a skincare company is fairly uncommon, and the brand showed that they were leading the charge on changing views of traditional masculinity and the relationship between men and the beauty industry. The company has also been outspoken about its advocacy for LGBTQ+ and the Black Lives Matter movement.
This willingness to speak up and messages of positivity resonated well with Gen Z, and the brand has continued to grow from strength to strength. As of January 2021, the brand raised a total of $2 million dollars in funding and has seen an average growth rate of 75% over the course of 2 years.
Visually, Starface can’t be described as anything but adorable. The brand takes futuristic visual cues like planets, cyborgs and metallic colors for their visuals. Their ‘About Me’ page is even written in the style of the Star Wars’ opening crawl.
They also combine this with more nostalgic elements, such as 2000s-esque memes, and collaborating with Gen Z’s childhood shows like Spongebob Squarepants and Sesame Street.
Tapping into nostalgia has been a winning formula for their brand so far, as our AI model found that these types of posts have gotten the highest number of likes on their Instagram page so far. The top color that was detected from the brand’s Instagram page was their signature yellow, making up 58% of the colors detected. It’s a bright, eye-catching shade and stands out in an Instagram grid, making it the perfect unique identifier of the brand.
Another key aspect of the Starface identity is their “main character”, whom they’ve named Big Yellow. This character is a brightly-colored pod that stores their Hydro-Stars, with a smiley face plastered on the front. Big Yellow is the animated personification of these pimple patches and serves as the voice of the brand across its different social media channels.
Big Yellow speaks directly to their Gen Z consumers using texting lingo, emojis, and playful punctuation, all as a way to draw attention and build a rapport with them. Starface often uses lowercase letters to start the sentence, a lot of question marks and abbreviations like “lmk”, “lil” and “2day”. The conversational-style captions are kept casual, and most importantly, seem authentic to the brand, which is crucial in reaching this generation of highly discerning consumers.
Our model also detected Affection, Affiliation, and Creativity as the top emotions of the brands’ posts, which is further proof of the kind of messages that they want to promote. The brand stands for inclusivity and finding your tribe within their community (“affection” and “affiliation”), but it also ranks “creativity” high in importance as well. They want to create a safe space for self-expression and to celebrate exactly who you are, hence the many user-generated content on their profile.
Starface combines many of the elements that appeal to Gen Z. They mix humor and information, with idiosyncratic design and striking visual cues, and successfully balances self-promotion with genuinely seeming to care about serious issues. Despite us knowing that their feeds are curated, Starface has managed to maintain a raw and unrefined element to their branding, which resonates well with their target generation.
Unlike the perfectly symmetrical and highly filtered content popularized by Millennials, Starface’s (and Gen Z) branding isn’t intimidating. In fact, they seem to say everyone is accepted and welcomed just as they are, and that there’s always beauty to be found in being perfectly imperfect.
We consider ourselves pretty well versed in the subject of Gen Z, so check out our report on how your brand can better engage and align with them, or just to understand this mysterious group of consumers.
Originally published at https://www.quilt.ai on June 6, 2022.
