The Guardian

How we helped The Guardian fill their knowledge gap around Gen Z.

The challenge

The Guardian works with clients who expect them to be experts; research was therefore needed to inform The Guardian about the issues facing young people today. The Guardian contacted YouthSight to fill the knowledge gaps.

Trina Everall, Head of Youth at The Guardian said: "Understanding our audiences is where it all starts and at the Guardian we knew that if we were helping universities and brands to connect with young people then we had to know everything we possibly could about who they are, where they are, how they live and what's important to them in their lives"

The solution

We conducted an online survey with a representative sample of 16-24s about their day-to-day life, their hopes for the future and the issues that are holding them back. We also conducted a focus group with 10 young people in Birmingham, to ensure we represented a wide range of views – half of the group were at university while half were either in employment, an apprenticeship or unemployed. Across the research we looked at six areas of their lives: University, Politics and Outlook, Career, Money, Media Consumption, Fashion/Brands, Identity, and their lives in general.

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The outcome

YouthSight provided a report that looked at the six areas of young people’s lives in detail, drawing comparisons between Gen Z and Gen Y to fully illustrate the differences between the generations. The report also focused on myth-busting, looking at over 25 myths about young people and what the reality actually is. The research results fed into a series of client events as well as editorial and marketing content, allowing The Guardian to showcase themselves as experts in Gen Z to their clients, audience and stakeholders.

Head of Youth

We chose YouthSight not only because they're the UK's leading youth research agency, they also have an excellent team of researchers who collaborated with our journalists to ask the questions that we needed answering.

Head of Youth

The project was a huge success, it created many new contacts, helped us to understand the audience we were trying to engage with and the feedback we received informed future projects that we embarked upon.

Head of Youth

The project was carried out in partnership with VCCP Media and together we championed the voices of young people through the research and focus groups carried out by YouthSight. Our findings were shared with youth marketing experts from global brands and educational institutions and YouthSight provided us with live student panels at each of our research events.

"Understanding alumni’s connection to the university is helping us to build a more nuanced communications and outreach programme based on people’s experience and life stage"

University of Oxford

Our Work

Success Stories

Our clients hire us because of our sector expertise, our research knowledge and our ability to reach exactly the right participants.

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Case Study: Sport England

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Get in touch

Do you have a student marketing challenge that you'd like to talk to us about?

Let's talk

The Guardian

How we helped The Guardian fill their knowledge gap around Gen Z.

The challenge

The solution

Do you have a project that you'd like to chat to us about?

Talk to a research from our Higher Education team to find out how we can help you boost student attraction, conversion and retention.

The outcome

Head of Youth

We chose YouthSight not only because they're the UK's leading youth research agency, they also have an excellent team of researchers who collaborated with our journalists to ask the questions that we needed answering.

Head of Youth

The project was a huge success, it created many new contacts, helped us to understand the audience we were trying to engage with and the feedback we received informed future projects that we embarked upon.

Head of Youth

"Understanding alumni’s connection to the university is helping us to build a more nuanced communications and outreach programme based on people’s experience and life stage"

University of Oxford

Success Stories

Case Study: Art Fund

How we helped Art Fund revolutionise their student offer

Case Study: Puma

How we helped Puma get more out of its celebrity ambassadors

Case Study: Sport England

How we helped Sport England get more young people active

Get in touch

Do you have a student marketing challenge that you'd like to talk to us about?

Get in touch

Enter your details below and a member of the HE research team will be in touch shortly.