Generation Z has been called “the sustainability generation.”

Born between 1997 and 2013, 58% of this consumer cohort seek to buy products that are sourced sustainably. Australian Gen Zs say they are willing to pay more for brands that have a positive impact on society.

Yet, at the same time, we have witnessed the meteoric rise of ultra-fast fashion from online, direct-to-consumer retailers such as Shein, Temu and Boohoo. Shein alone generated US$32.5 billion (A$48.3 billion) in revenue in 2024—a 43% increase from 2022.

There are complexities surrounding Gen Z’s shopping habits and how these often fail to align with their values.

On one hand, they covet a brand-new clothing item that is markedly more affordable when purchased from an ultra-fast fashion brand. On the other hand, they are aware of the environmental harms.

What explains this cognitive dissonance?

Caring about the environment …

Different from their predecessors, Gen Z has grown up with climate change as an urgent issue. Being chronically online means these concerns are not limited to their local environment.

Recent research revealed a pattern of stronger emotions of fear, guilt and outrage about the impacts of climate change among younger people, compared with older groups. These emotions could well be a driver of their activism and engagement with climate change.

They expect companies—those they buy from and work for—to prioritize sustainability in their business practices.

However, Gen Z crave more engaging ways to receive sustainability-related content. This is a worthy consideration for key players in the fashion industry.

… vs. the temptation of fast fashion

Gen Z consumers are plugged into social media trends that appear with every scroll and swipe on TikTok and Instagram. Social media have spiked cultural trends that accelerate fast fashion.

Influencers promote “reps” (slang for replicas) and “dupes” (duplicates): cheaper, imitation versions of high-end fashion items. This is a way to democratize luxury by normalizing “superfake” products and making luxury more accessible to a broader audience.

Social media tactics such as “hauls” and get-ready-with-me (“GRWM”) videos entice Gen Zs to get stuck on the treadmill of overconsumption. The idea is for content creators to show off massive amounts of new, trendy clothing. This in turn fuels the desire for consumers to continuously buy what they are seeing online—in bulk.

Fast fashion giants such as Zara and H&M have based their business models on translating what is on catwalks into cheap clothing, produced in mass quantities. Now, ultra-fast fashion brands such as Shein speed up the production cycle, the trend churn and consequently the volume.

Having seven trending items, over two high-quality outfits, makes more sense to Gen Z consumers in the digital age.

The cost-of-living crisis plays a part too. A recent survey of Australian Gen Zs revealed at least 77% are experiencing money concerns.

The biggest demographic to pull back on spending due to economic stress are 18–26-year-olds. Young people typically earn the lowest wages and enjoy less job security. These financial constraints are challenging to Gen Zs seeking to consume more sustainably.

Fast fashion becomes a cheap option for them to stay trendy without breaking the bank.

The ‘attitude–behavior gap’

Gen Z are Shein shoppers, haul lovers, micro-trend followers, and repeat outfit shamers. This stands starkly against their eco-conscious values.

While this seems hypocritical, it is what is referred to as the attitude–behavior gap—the incongruence between what people say and what they actually do. This is a phenomenon noted across multiple generations.

The attitude–behavior gap has been widely documented in social psychology and ethical consumerism studies. These underscore that consumer intentions are not reliable predictors of behavior.

Even ethically minded consumers do not always walk their talk. But we can’t expect individual consumers to be entirely responsible for things like the carbon footprint of fast fashion, or the exploitation of workers in factories.

The clothing industry lacks transparency in business practice and Gen Z consumers often lack information about the products they are buying.

The responsibility to shop sustainably should not fall solely on consumers, but on governments, policymakers and corporations to be more ethical.

Unsurprisingly, 88% of Gen Z shoppers do not trust companies’ sustainability claims.

What does this mean for the sustainability movement?

Despite climate change being a major stressor for Gen Z, the attitude–behavior gap continues to exist when it comes to hunting for a new outfit.

Being bombarded with persuasive tactics from brands and influencers, the ease of access to new items at the click of a button, and the allure of affordable pricing amid a cost-of-living crisis makes it very difficult for even the most committed Gen Z consumer to buy ethically.

The fashion industry is one of the biggest dangers to the environment in terms of its carbon and raw material footprint, and truckloads of clothing ending up in landfills.

While most young people know and respect Greta Thunberg’s environmental mission, she is not the one they are watching on TikTok or liking on Instagram.

It is time to re-engage with social media content creators in different ways that educate consumers, promote responsible behavior and advocate for changed regulations and business practices. This might include tried-and-true tactics such as influencer endorsements and haul videos that are refocused on more sustainable options—like online second-hand retailers.

The emergence of “underconsumption core” on TikTok in recent months, as well as “deinfluencing,” where influencers call on their followers to buy less, is promising.

While sustainable clothing has a “bad rap” for being expensive, fast fashion brands are trying to adapt by offering options such as H&M Conscious. Any fashion offering must be convenient, accessible and trendy to capture Gen Z’s attention and wallet.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As is their tradition at this time of year, Apple announced a new line of iPhones last week. The promised centerpiece that would make us want to buy these new devices was AI—or Apple Intelligence, as they branded it. Yet the reaction from the collective world of consumer technology has been muted.

The lack of enthusiasm from consumers was so evident it immediately wiped over a hundred billion dollars off Apple’s share price. Even the Wired Gadget Lab podcast, enthusiasts of all new things tech, found nothing in the new capabilities that would make them want to upgrade to the iPhone 16.

The only thing that did seem to generate some excitement was not the AI features, but the addition of a new camera shutter button on the side of the phone. If a button is a better selling point than the most hyped technology of the past couple of years, something is clearly amiss.

The reason is that AI has now passed what tech blog The Media Copilot called its “wonderment phase.” Two years ago, we were amazed that ChatGPT, DALL-E and other generative AI systems were able to create coherent writing and realistic images from just a few words in a text prompt. But now, AI needs to show that it can actually be productive. Since their introduction, the models driving these experiences have become much more powerful—and exponentially more expensive.

Nevertheless, Google, NVidia, Microsoft and OpenAI recently met at the White House to discuss AI infrastructure, suggesting these companies are doubling down on the technology.

According to Forbes, the industry is US$500 billion (£375 billion) short of making back the massive investments in AI hardware and software, and the US$100 billion in AI revenue projected to be made in 2024 is not even close to this figure. But Apple still has to enthusiastically push AI features into their products for the same reason that Google, Samsung and Microsoft are doing it –- to give consumers a reason to buy a new device.

Tough sell?

Before AI, the industry was trying to create hype around virtual reality and the Metaverse, an effort that probably peaked with the introduction of the Apple Vision Pro headset in 2023 (a product that incidentally was barely even mentioned in last week’s announcement).

After the Metaverse failed to take off, tech companies needed something else to drive sales, and AI has become the new shiny thing. But it remains to be seen whether consumers will take to the AI-based features included in phones such as photo-editing and writing assistants.

This is not to say that current AI is not useful. AI technologies are used in billion-dollar industry applications, in everything from online advertisements to health care and energy optimization.

Generative AI has also become a useful tool for professionals in many fields. According to a survey, 97% of software developers have used AI tools to support their work. Many journalists, visual artists, musicians and filmmakers have adopted AI tools to create content more quickly and more efficiently.

Yet most of us are not actually prepared to pay for a service that draws funny cartoon cats or summarizes text –- especially since attempts at AI-supported search have shown to be prone to errors. Apple’s approach to deploying artificial intelligence seems to mostly be a mishmash of existing functions, many of which are already built into popular third-party apps.

Apple’s AI can help you create a custom emoji, transcribe a phone call, edit a photo, or write an email –- neat, but no longer groundbreaking stuff. There is also something called Reduce mode that is supposed to disturb you less and only let through important notifications, but it’s anyone’s guess how well that will work in reality.

The one forward-looking feature is called Visual Intelligence. It allows you to aim the camera at something in the surroundings and get information without explicitly doing a search. For instance, you might photograph a restaurant sign, and the phone will tell you the menu, show you reviews—and perhaps even help you book a table.

Although this is very reminiscent of the Lens in Google’s Pixel phones (or ChatGPT’s multimodal capabilities), it does point towards a future use of AI that is more real-time, interactive, and situated in real-world environments.

In the extension, Apple Intelligence and the Reduce mode could evolve into so-called “context-aware computing”, which has been envisioned and demonstrated in research projects since the 1990s, but for the most part has not yet become robust enough to be a real product category.

The kicker to all this is that Apple Intelligence is not yet really available for anyone to try, as the new iPhones do not yet include them. Perhaps it will turn out they are more valuable than the limited information seems to indicate. But Apple used to be known for only releasing a product when it was well and truly ready, meaning that the use-case was crystal clear and the user experience had been honed to perfection.

This is what made the iPod and iPhone so much more attractive than all the MP3 players and smartphones released before them. It is anyone’s guess if Apple’s approach to AI will be able to claw back some of the lost stock price, not to mention the hundreds of billions invested by them and the rest of the tech industry.

After all, AI still has amazing potential, but it may be time to slow down a bit, and take a moment to consider where it will actually be the most useful.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

To appeal to the majority of consumers, winemakers may want to pay as much attention to what’s on the bottle as what’s in it.

A three-part experimental study led by Washington State University researchers found that women were more inclined to purchase wine that had labels with feminine gender cues. The more strongly the participants identified with other women, a phenomenon called “in-group identification,” the greater this effect was. A feminine label also influenced their expectation that they would like the wine better.

With women representing 59% of U.S. wine consumers, the male-dominated field of winemaking might want to pay attention to the perceptions of this understudied group, said Ruiying Cai, lead author of the paper in the International Journal of Hospitality Management.

“When you look at the market segments, women are actually purchasing a lot of wine. They are a large group,” said Cai, an assistant professor with WSU’s Carson College of Business.

“We found that feminine cues speak to women consumers. They have more favorable attitudes toward the label and the wine itself. They were also expecting their overall sensory experience to be better, and they were more likely to purchase the wine.”

Gender cues often rely on stereotypes, and in initial tests for this research, a group of 90 women rated wine labels as more masculine when they featured rugged animals like wolves and stags as well as portraits of men. They designated labels as feminine that had cute animals, flowers and female portraits. Labels with castles and bunches of grapes were seen as neutral.

In two online experiments, a total of 324 women were shown fictitious wines with labels designed with these gendered cues. The participants showed higher intention to buy wines with a feminine label, such as a woman holding flowers, as opposed to a wine with a masculine label, such as a bulldog in a spiked collar.

When asked about the expected sensory experience, they rated their liking of every sensory aspect higher, including the color, taste, aroma and aftertaste.

The participant’s level of wine expertise moderated their taste expectations but surprisingly, not their purchase intentions.

“Whether they were knowledgeable or less knowledgeable about wine, when they saw those feminine cues, they had a higher intention to buy the wine. The gender cue influence was so strong, it trumped the effect of that knowledge,” said co-author Christina Chi, a professor at WSU’s Carson College of Business.

A third experiment with another set of 138 women involved a taste test—also with a surprising finding. Researchers gave bottles of the same red wine with one of the gendered labels.

More women who tasted the feminine-labeled wine ranked it higher in fruit flavors such as red current and blueberry than those who tasted the same wine with a masculine-cued label—and despite the fact those flavors were not dominant components in that particular wine. Women connected more mineral flavors with the masculine-labeled wine.

However, the participants who tasted the feminine-labeled wine reported liking it less than the women who tasted the masculine-labeled wines. The authors said this could be a result of the incongruence between the expected flavor influenced by the feminine label and the actual taste of the wine sample, which had a medium body, tannin and alcohol level.

Few studies have focused on the perceptions of women wine consumers in a field where 82% of the winemakers are men. That lack of perspective is very apparent on wine aisles, said Chi, noting that many vintners seem to favor masculine imagery like stallions, bulls and roosters—and one brand even features a prisoner in a jail cell.

“When designing the labels, winemakers should involve more women in the process, and it’s highly advisable to pilot test the labels among consumers for gender cues,” she said.

In addition to Cai and Chi, co-authors on this study include recent WSU graduate Demi Deng now at Auburn University and Robert Harrington of WSU.

Sony’s PlayStation Network went down for hours on Tuesday, frustrating gamers around the world who complained they weren’t able to sign in to their accounts.

PlayStation Network said on its website that “some services are experiencing issues,” and that players “might have difficulty” logging in, creating accounts, launching games or getting video content.

“We are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible,” it said. Sony did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Data from Downdetector, an outage tracker, showed that reports first spiked late Monday and continued into early Tuesday with thousands of reports submitted hours after the problem first emerged.

The outage was resolved by morning in the U.S. and the Playstation Network website was updated with a message that said, “All services are up and running.”

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