Followers are vanity, community is the only real moat: India’s brand chiefs debate Gen Z

MUMBAI: India’s Gen Z population, more than 370 million strong and bigger than the entire United States, is done being treated as one audience waiting to be spoken at in one language. That was the provocation Anil Wanvari, founder and editor-in-chief of IndianTelevision.com, threw at a room of brand leaders in Delhi last week, at an exclusive edition of the Brand Wizards Roundtable. The panel brought together Anupam Bansal, executive director, Liberty Shoes; Abhishek Mehta, digital marketing lead, Dabur; Aanchal Mahajan, co-founder, Snooplay; Kunal Kumrawat, head of brand and promos, STAGE; Nisha Khatri, head of marketing, Libas; Ria Rustagi, co-founder and chief executive, Sychedelic; and Rumi Ambastha, head of marketing, SKINQ.

The consensus that emerged was blunt: followers are a vanity metric, and community is the last thing in marketing that still has to be earned. Kumrawat argued that follower counts mean little when engagement doesn’t follow, while a genuine community keeps talking about a brand even when it goes quiet. Mehta pushed back on the idea that every category needs one, insisting commodity products rarely benefit from community-building the way cult brands or aspirational categories do, and warned Gen Z won’t spread themselves thin across dozens of brand communities.

Mahajan offered a subtler read: brands don’t always need to build community from scratch, they can simply show up inside ones that already exist, whether that’s neighbourhood parenting WhatsApp groups or organic Reddit threads. Ambastha, drawing on 16 years across brands including The Man Company and Swiss Beauty, made the sharpest case for why community has stopped being optional, pointing to a market so crowded that product differentiation is nearly dead, leaving storytelling and loyalty as the only real edge. At SKINQ she is deliberately building a tiny, high-trust WhatsApp group rather than chasing scale.

Rustagi framed community as trust infrastructure for high-ticket, pre-order businesses like her wearable-tech startup, where buyers are effectively betting money on a founder’s story months before the product arrives.

Language surfaced as a second battleground. Kumrawat, whose platform STAGE produces content in regional dialects, argued authenticity of language is what separates real connection from performative outreach, citing Gen Z’s rejection of Bollywood’s attempts at dialect. Mehta described Dabur’s approach to reviving legacy brands through cultural storytelling rather than product pitches.

Asked to sum up Indian Gen Z community-building in one word, the panel split: belongingness, raw authenticity, authenticity, and, from Ambastha, a candid “nascent.” On which platform matters most over the next year, the room converged on WhatsApp, with Kumrawat adding that STAGE has built an in-app AI companion letting fans chat with characters from its shows, generating tens of thousands of conversations a month.