How Legacy Brands Lost GenZ

Generation Z has divorced legacy brands. From fashion to food, skincare to supplements, young Indians are abandoning household names for Instagram-born startups their parents have never heard of. Zara feels too expensive and repetitive. H&M lacks uniqueness. Traditional brands feel inauthentic and mass-produced. But this isn't about price alone. It's about trust, personalization, and meaning. In an era where identity is curated pixel by pixel on social media, GenZ needs brands that speak their language—brands with personality, rough edges, and values that align with their own. Brand consulting and founder of Think9 Consumer Technologies Santosh Desai, ET's Aanya Thakur and Tanishka Dubey as well as Valley's Shubh Agrawal tell host Anirban Chowdhury it’s a "fundamental structural shift"— a permanent rewiring of consumer behavior driven by technology, media fragmentation, and the democratization of distribution. Brand loyalty, he argues, was always just inertia. And that inertia is dead. Welcome to the post-loyalty economy.

You can follow Anirban Chowdhury on his social media: X and Linkedin

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