Two words guaranteed to inflate under 25 years? New emojis.
Fifty-six new emojis will come online later this year with the release of the Unicode 10.0 release, the Unicode Consortium announced this week. There will be a literally blown emoji, a breastfeeding emoji and – drumroll please – the long awaited orange heart emoji. The version will also include a set of Typicon marks and symbols as well as a bitcoin sign.
Consult some of them below, via Emojipedia:
Most brands and technology companies are targeting the Gen Z audience, and for a while, they've done it using stickers on apps like Instagram and apps. downloadable sticker packs. But for last year, emojis have been the way forward. According to eMarketer, there are 6 billion emoticons or stickers sent every day in the world on mobile messaging applications.
"Gen Z is fast and efficient", award-winning book author How cool brands stay warm Joeri Van den Bergh said at a conference on youth marketing strategy in New York last year. "They are the generation 'emojinal' because a picture is worth more than 1000 words.The brands should take note of that when they try to talk to this generation.Remove yourself of the boring aspects of marketing because we have a visual generation here. "
Van den Bergh refers to Pepsi as being a company that exploits the heavy reliance on emojis as Gen Z's communication, with this ad they created last year and their downloadable Pepsimoji keyboard .
According to a 2015 study by Fuse Marketing, the Unicode language was developed in 1999 by Japanese engineers and has since become a global element of electronic communication.
The study notes the transition from the handwritten letter to e-mail communications, from text to tweets, and how Gen Y and Z use emojis and emoticons to advance their communication with each other.
"Emojis do what the tone of voice has done on the phone and what gestures, tones and facial expressions have done in interpersonal communication," said Mitchell Stephens, professor at the Arthur Institute of Journalism L. Carter from NYU. "It gives people something that has been gone for five thousand five hundred years."
The proof is in the numbers. Brands like Microsoft, Mentos, Ikea and Comedy Central have all created their own emojis, and Instagram reports that nearly 50% of all captions and comments on its platform have an emoji. Sixty-four percent of Millennials communicate with them regularly.
The study, however, warns brands creating emojis on a whim.
"It's essential that (brands) do not become the equivalent of an embarrassing parent." Striving to stay cool using emojis and emoticons can have negative consequences if it is poorly executed, "says the study." By understanding young people's culture and the way emojis are used in their daily communication, brands can successfully create authentic content with which young consumers want to see themselves. " to engage. "
Reaching out to the next generation means doing it visually and according to the study, "Brands that do not speak the language of teens and young adults today may be perceived as less relevant. "
Kyler Sumter is a student from Boston University and a digital producer from USA TODAY.