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I’m familiar with the term “cord cutter,” a person who cut the cord from a pay TV subscription.

I came across a related term today and it was new to me:

Cord never.

According to PCMag:

A "cord never" or "never-connected" is someone who never had such a subscription, while "cord shavers" are subscribers who have reduced their pay TV fees by eliminating certain channels.

Let’s consider the approximate age range of different generations:

• Baby Boomer: 60-69
• Gen X: 44-59
• Millennial: 28-43
• Gen Z: 12-27
• Gen Alpha: 11 and younger

I’m generalizing a bit, but I gather that:

• Baby Boomer: Fully corded
• Gen X: Half corded, half cord cutter
• Millennial: One-third corded, two-thirds cord cutter
• Gen Z: Cord never
• Gen Alpha: Ask their parents ;-)

I’m a proud member of Gen X. When I started my career in marketing, my audience was mostly Gen X and Baby Boomers.

Years later, I began to understand that millennials were now part of my target audience.

For B2B products, including high-end B2B technology, I believe Gen Z is now part of the mix, as an influencer on the buying committee or in some cases, the ultimate decision maker.

My daughter, a third-year college student, is Gen Z.

Could I as a Gen X do an effective job at marketing to my daughter and her friends?

They tend to have a different mindset, with potentially different priorities and core values. There’s also a language barrier.

The words they use, especially slang, are different from the ones I use.

When my daughter changes into an outfit she asks me, "fit check?"

I think she's asking me about the fit of her clothes.

Instead, she's asking for input on her outfit.

When “rizz” was announced as the Oxford Word of the Year 2023, it was the first time I heard of it.

According to Oxford Languages:
 
Use of the word as recorded in our corpus has increased dramatically in 2023, with a peak in June 2023, when actor Tom Holland was asked in a widely reported interview about his ‘rizz’, to which he answered, ‘I have no rizz whatsoever, I have limited rizz.’

The word ‘rizz’ can also be used as a verb, often in the phrase ‘rizz up’, which means ‘to attract, seduce, or chat up (a person)’.

A Gen X friend of mine jokingly texted his Gen Z daughter and wrote something like this:

Hey, it’s the rizzer and I’m here to rizz it up.

He was poking fun at the word, but in truth, would he or I be able to connect with Gen Z in an authentic way using their lingo?

To Gen Z, I think Gen X has no rizz whatsoever 😜

The scary thought

Here’s the scary thing 😱

Those of us in Gen X are pay TV.

We can survive a few more years marketing to other Gen X. Maybe even some millennials.

But Gen Z will be our core audience soon enough.

And they’re cord nevers.

Our B2B content (e.g., eBooks and long form blog posts) is VH1 or Comedy Central programming and our new audience doesn’t subscribe to cable.

Let’s not continue producing what we’re used to producing if our audience will ignore it.

How do we adapt? A few thoughts.