The company funded ‘It’s Lit: A guide to what teens think is cool’, which found that it was more cool than Vice, Nike and Facebook

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Today’s teenagers think Google and Google brands are cool, research funded by Google has found.

Google published “It’s Lit: A guide to what teens think is cool”, a “magazine” compiling the results of its research into Generation Z, characterised as those aged from 13 to 17.

The Google-funded research found Generation Z relied on brands to “shape their world”, and that Google was the third-most cool. Cool was defined by the researchers as “unique, impressive, interesting, amazing, or awesome”.

YouTube, which Google owns, came out at number one ahead of Netflix. Google’s web browser Chrome placed tenth, in front of Nike.



Heraclitus (@DreamboatSlim) This is good. Google has conducted a piece of research which concludes that teens consider a web browser cooler than Nike pic.twitter.com/ZtCH3Wl6gH

1,100 teenagers aged 13-17 were asked to rank 122 brands by coolness and awareness.

YouTube, Google and Netflix ranked highly by both.

Luke Bailey (@imbadatlife) Also, fan of the fact about 40 teens looked someone straight in the eye and said, "Google? Never heard of it." pic.twitter.com/JoYnyJSjnb

According to the surveyed teens, McDonalds, Yahoo and Facebook Messenger were high-profile but not cool.

Doritos and Oreo were cool.

Vice was not cool.

Overall, the least cool brands were TMZ, the Wall Street Journal, Sprint and Yahoo. Respondents were least aware of Uniqlo, Patagonia and Supreme.

Mike Bird (@Birdyword) Of hundreds of brands Google asked teens about, they ranked the WSJ least cool. Well kids, the bond market doesn't think you're cool either pic.twitter.com/667VlxxK7K

But those surveyed for the Google study were united in their appreciation of Google, with Millennials describing it as “serious and functional” and Generation Z finding it more “fun and functional”.

A 17-year-old woman in suburban Florida was quoted as saying that Google was “not only a powerful search engine, but great at everything it does, from email to documents”.

“Teens love learning and knowing” was researchers’ conclusion.

The study stated that 42.2% of Generation Z respondents used its social network Google Plus, putting it ahead of Twitter (35.4%) and Pinterest (26.6%) and only a little over 10% behind Facebook.



But the finding betrays the fact that a Google Plus account comes part and parcel with use of its other services such as Gmail. An independent study in 2015 suggested fewer than 1% of Google’s 2.2bn users were active on Google Plus.

Responding to the research on social media, many expressed scepticism as to its validity.

“This study is a great piece of native advertising for Google services,” tweeted one technology commentator.

Many write-ups of the report referenced Steve Buscemi’s appearance on 30 Rock, now a popular meme: “How do you do, fellow kids?”

Maya Kosoff (@mekosoff) "how do you do, fellow kids?" - google https://t.co/OpKspXg9vH pic.twitter.com/o11ee59OG4







