Chloe Combi

Chloe Combi has interviewed more than thirty thousand young people, which is the fact that matters about her, because almost everything else said about these generations is downstream of a survey panel.

Generation Z: Their Voices, Their Lives, published in 2015, was the first book on the cohort, and it was built the way she has built everything since: by going and asking them, at length, and publishing what they said rather than what it was convenient for them to have said. She has continued the method into Generation Alpha, the cohort now entering secondary school and reaching employers next.

She writes on both generations as a columnist for The Independent and hosts the podcast You Don't Know Me. She has advised organizations including Google, Netflix, the European Central Bank, Diageo, Porsche, Barclays and Johnson and Johnson, and the United Nations, and she co-directed a virtual reality series for Meta. She also cofounded The Respect Project, working with schools on mental health, consent, body image and wellbeing, which is where a good deal of the primary material originates.

For a commercial audience the value is predictive rather than descriptive. An organization planning a product, a brand or a hiring strategy for the next five years is making assumptions about people who are currently thirteen, and she is one of the few speakers whose material on that group is first-hand.

She is based in the United Kingdom and speaks internationally. The sessions suit marketing and brand teams, employers redesigning early careers, and any leadership group whose plan depends on being right about what the next cohort will want.