Pet Owners as Consumers: A Close Look at Gen Z and Millennials

Rockville MD, September 5, 2024 In its just-released report on Gen Z and Millennials as Pet Care Consumers, Packaged Facts analyzes how digital and interactive media have helped shape the psychographic and shopping patterns of younger-generation pet owners, both generally and within the pet market.

As commonly defined, the Silent Generation was followed by Baby Boomers (born 1946-64) and then by Gen X (born 1965-1976), Gen Y (born 1977-1996), and Gen Z (born 1997-2010). The term “Millennials” has largely replaced the generic “Gen Y”.

The report acknowledges that consumer generations aren’t uniformed bands parading in sequence through time. Nor, obviously, are those within generational cohorts marching hand-in-hand. Generational generalizations can create over-simplified stereotypes and focus excessively on differences, rather than continuities, overlaps, and continuities.

Even so, as report analyst David Sprinkle argues, a focus on generations “helps us understand how societies and consumer behavior change over time, however sticky human nature and however diverse individual experience may be.”

Millennials were the first generation that grew up with personal computers and the internet, and that Gen Z are the first doubled-down, “fully digital native” generation, born into a world with fully loaded smartphones and social media. The Millennial vs. Gen Z timespans are not carved in stone, but a game-changing series of technologies launched around 1977 (marking by birth year the Gen X vs. Millennial transition) and again around 1997 (the transition to Gen Z).

This timeline – and, as importantly, a ramped-up technology adoption pace – are essential to understanding consumer behavior shifts between Gen Z, Millennials, and previous generations. With Twitter compressing text messages and TikTok shrinking down video, for example, apps have both catered to and created the streamlined attention span that Boomers and employers sometimes (not necessarily sympathetically) associate with Gen Z.

With that said, connectivity and connected devices define modern lifestyles, with consumers making themselves nearly always reachable at high and uniform rates across generations, whether by internet, smartphone, or social media. But Gen Z and Millennials are especially positive about the benefits that technology brings, and even keener than previous generations about consumer technology and connectivity products.

Adoption of tech products is a key trend to watch in the pet industry. COVID-19 related trends and aftereffects have benefited the emerging pet tech category beyond pet microchips. Consumer technology products, in turn, contribute to making the pet industry what Packaged Facts terms “omnimarket”, creating links that crisscross traditional channel and product silos for pet food, non-food pet supplies, and veterinary services.

For Gen Z (especially) and Millennials, connectivity isn’t just about being reachable – it’s about continually being influenced and influential through digital give-and-take. The new generations are more prone than average to give and receive advice on topics ranging from health questions to financial matters to consumer products and services. Personal lives blur with product recommendations, a dynamic monetized by consumers and well as marketers through refer-a-friend promotions.

As Packaged Facts argues, digital and interactive technologies have ramped up consumer access to traditional product and service providers while simultaneously creating powerful (and sometimes frenemy) intermediaries between them. The same occurs with the virtualization of social relationships, redrawing the Venn Diagrams between personal, professional, and commercial. Consumer behavior and marketing implications are rampant.

About Packaged Facts  

Packaged Facts publishes market intelligence on a wide range of consumer market topics, including consumer demographics and shopper insights, consumer financial products and services, consumer goods and retailing, and pet products and services. Packaged Facts also offers a full range of custom research services.

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