Youth Month triggers a familiar cascade: statistics about unemployment, profiles of young founders, campaigns featuring people under thirty. All of it well-intentioned. All of it built on a premise nobody has stopped to interrogate properly: that youth is a demographic. It is not. And the sooner the industry accepts that, the sooner it will produce work that actually connects.

The Definition Problem

The marketing industry's own textbooks define the "youth market" as anyone between the ages of 11 and 35. By that measure, a 34-year-old chief executive with a decade of business decisions behind her is still a youth marketing target. A 22-year-old who has never left her hometown and consumes no digital media is also one.

Clearly, age is doing very little work here.

What the industry is actually trying to reach when it says "youth" is a set of behaviours, a particular quality of mind: curiosity, openness to the new, a willingness to take considered risks, an appetite for connection that feels real rather than manufactured. The question worth asking this Youth Month is not how old your target audience is. It is what it means to think young.

What the Futurists Have Been Telling Us

Faith Popcorn's "Down-Aging" trend, tracked since 1974, describes consumers across all age groups refusing the mental furniture society assigns to their stage of life. Not denial. A different relationship with possibility. Dion Chang of Flux Trends makes a related point: what makes young South African consumers distinctive is not their birth year but their mindset. Bronwyn Williams, economist and futurist also at Flux Trends, is blunter still: the most agile, most values-driven consumers do not fit neatly into a generational bracket. The framework the industry needs is not generational. It is dispositional.

The Alliance That Proved the Point

We work together in a formal strategic alliance between TM Relations and VocalCord PR. One of us is Gen X. The other is Gen Z. An entire generation sits between us, and neither of us is it.

What made the alliance possible was not that we were similar. It was that we were both, in the truest sense of the word, young in our thinking.

Marilize does not think like someone who has arrived. She thinks like someone still in motion. That quality has a name. It is not "Gen X". It is youthful.

Thabani's contribution has required something equally important: the ability to think beyond the moment, to hold a long view while moving fast. That quality also has a name. It is not "Gen Z". It is maturity.

Youthfulness and maturity do not belong to separate generations. They are both available to anyone willing to cultivate them. The most effective communicators, the most resonant brands, and the most enduring agencies carry both simultaneously.

What This Means for the Industry

If youth is a mindset rather than an age bracket, then youth marketing is a fundamentally different discipline than the one most agencies are currently practising.

Your audience is not defined by when they were born. It is defined by how they engage. A 50-year-old who builds new things, questions old assumptions, and buys based on values is a "youth" consumer in every way that matters to your brief. A 25-year-old settled into inherited patterns, making no active choices about brand loyalty, is not.

The people producing your youth strategy do not need to be young by age. They need to be young by disposition: curious, current, honest about what they do not yet know, and structurally connected to people who see the world differently. Not a young intern brought in for culture checks. Not a Gen Z panel consulted once before the pitch. A genuine, equal partnership between different ways of thinking, held together by shared purpose.

The Question Nobody Has Asked

Youth Month is the right moment to ask the question the industry has been avoiding.

Not: how do we reach young people? But: are we young enough in our thinking to deserve their attention?

The answer is available to anyone willing to examine it honestly. Not by checking a birth certificate. By checking a mindset.

*Image courtesy of contributor