‘You have to keep re-earning it’: Why Gen Z loyalty is becoming harder for brands to win

MUMBAI: For years, marketers have chased brand loyalty as one of the strongest indicators of consumer affinity. But when it comes to Gen Z, loyalty is no longer something brands can assume they have earned.

At Indian Media Biz’s  Brand Wizards Roundtable, themed ‘Building Communities: Best Practices for Gen Z Marketers’, marketers across categories argued that Gen Z may be loyal to brands, but that loyalty has to be continuously earned.

The conversation, moderated by Anil Wanvari, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, IndianTelevision.com, brought together Ajay Singh of HRX, Ayush Kumar of Appreciate, CJ Mathews of Ashar Group, Kapil Bhatia of UNIREC, Kulbhushan Atkar of Pepperfry, Namita Mitla of Hunger Inc Hospitality, Parth Parmar of Paré Innovations and Shiv Bhasin of Wow! Momo.

The question was straightforward: Is Gen Z loyal to brands, or only to experiences?

The answers suggested that the distinction may not matter as much as marketers think.

Loyalty has to be earned repeatedly

Namita Mitla, Head of Marketing at Hunger Inc Hospitality, argued that Gen Z can be loyal to both brands and experiences, but brands cannot assume that loyalty will continue automatically.

Her observation was that unlike earlier generations, Gen Z requires brands to keep proving their relevance. A successful first interaction may get a consumer through the door, but it does not guarantee long-term loyalty.

Ajay Singh, Business Head at HRX, made a similar point from a fitness perspective.

Consumers today have access to more choices, and Gen Z’s exposure to competing products and experiences makes experimentation easier. According to Singh, consumers can stick with a brand, but the abundance of options also encourages them to explore alternatives.

That changes the marketer’s job.

The challenge is no longer simply creating awareness and converting a consumer once. It is about ensuring that the brand continues to have a role in the consumer’s life.

‘Become part of what they’re doing’

Singh’s approach to community building at HRX illustrates this shift.

Rather than telling communities what they should do for the brand, HRX attempts to integrate itself into activities consumers are already pursuing.

He cited the example of the brand’s high-protein milk collaboration with Country Delight. Instead of pushing the product through a conventional promotional approach, HRX integrated it into existing running communities through high-protein matcha.

The logic was simple: if consumers already have a behaviour or ritual, the brand should find a natural role within it.

That is fundamentally different from creating a community around a product and expecting consumers to join it.

Communities can outlive brands

Mitla took the idea even further.

Speaking about Bombay Sweetshop, she explained that the brand is attempting to recreate the role traditionally played by sweet shops and other neighbourhood spaces — places where people could meet, interact and form communities.

The bigger ambition is to create a community that continues to exist even when the brand is not physically present.

That distinction matters.

A customer base is built around transactions. A community can be built around shared identity, interests or experiences.

And for Gen Z, marketers at the roundtable suggested, that difference is increasingly important.

Experiences can be the gateway

Parth Parmar, Director at Paré Innovations, suggested that Gen Z may initially be more loyal to experiences, with brand loyalty developing when the product and service consistently deliver on expectations.

In other words, the experience can get the consumer interested, but the product has to give them a reason to stay.

That idea was visible in the examples shared by the panel.

HRX has built community-driven initiatives around running and fitness. Hunger Inc Hospitality has used physical spaces to tap into local communities through activities ranging from film screenings and screenwriting workshops to improv nights. Wow! Momo uses local influencers and language to establish relevance in different markets.
The common thread is that the brands are not treating community as a standalone marketing campaign.

They are attempting to make the brand useful or relevant within an existing consumer behaviour.

The consumer has more power

The proliferation of social and digital platforms has fundamentally changed how consumers discover, evaluate and ultimately choose brands.

Ayush Kumar, VP Marketing at Appreciate, said the fundamentals of marketing, including pricing, branding, trust, availability and distribution, remain unchanged. What has changed is the way consumers access information and make decisions.

“They’ve broken down the traditional way of seeing media, how we market, where we’re present and how we distribute ourselves. They don’t look at established platforms for their source of information anymore. What product should I buy? Where should I get my news? It’s the person they follow on social, on Instagram. It’s the influencer,” Kumar said.

According to Kumar, the proliferation of digital platforms has created a far more informed and research-driven consumer. Instead of relying on a store, an e-commerce platform or a brand’s own communication, consumers can now gather information from multiple sources before making a purchase.

“Because of the availability of so many digital platforms, they hunt for information, they hunt for insights. The really discerning consumers go on a research spree. They collect information, analyse it and then look for social proof and signals from people they follow and trust. That’s when they make a decision,” he said.

This shift has effectively given consumers greater control over the path to purchase. A brand can no longer assume that its own messaging will be the primary influence on a consumer’s decision. It is competing with influencers, creators, peer recommendations and conversations happening across platforms.

For categories such as furniture, the increase in consumer choice has made the challenge even sharper. Kulbhushan Atkar, Chief Revenue Officer atPepperfry, pointed to the rapid expansion of furniture brands in India and the resulting ease with which consumers can move between them.

“In furniture, there have easily been hundreds of brands opening up in India over the last three years. The cost of switching from one brand to another is minimal. Consumers today have access to multiple experiences, both online and offline, so brands have to keep earning their value every time a customer interacts with them,” Atkar said.

According to Atkar, this changing landscape is also pushing brands to move beyond broad regional strategies and understand consumers at a much more granular, micro-market level.

“Mumbai is no longer just Mumbai. It is Andheri, Thane, Kalyan. You need to go more and more into depth rather than breadth,” he said, pointing to how differences in local communities can influence everything from influencer partnerships and language to consumer preferences.

For brands targeting younger consumers, that hyperlocal approach can become another way of staying relevant. A campaign or influencer strategy that works in one neighbourhood may not necessarily translate directly to another, making cultural and behavioural understanding increasingly important.

It also explains why authenticity featured so prominently in the conversation.

Kapil Bhatia argued that social media demands humanised content and that major campaigns still need human intervention even as AI takes over some routine tasks.

For Gen Z, then, the question is not simply whether a brand is visible.

It is whether the brand feels credible enough to be invited into the consumer’s world.

From loyalty to relevance

The roundtable’s larger message was that marketers should stop viewing Gen Z loyalty as a one-time achievement.

The consumer can change. The trend can change. The community can change. And the alternatives available to that consumer can change almost overnight.

Which means the brands that want to retain Gen Z may have to keep earning their place.

As Mitla put it during the discussion, Gen Z does not have much patience for brand laziness.

For marketers, that could be the real definition of loyalty in the Gen Z era: not a consumer who never leaves, but a consumer who continues to find a reason to come back.