For decades, luxury set the standard, with consumers buying into the visual grammar of aspiration.
Yet these old rules of premium branding have collapsed because Gen Z never bought into them, just as they never bought into heritage branding. Gen Z consumers evaluate brands in the same way they evaluate everything else: laterally, comparatively, and without the deference on which the old hierarchy depended. A drinks brand isn't competing with other drinks brands. Instead, it competes with the best experience that person had yesterday: the app that worked seamlessly, the café that named the grower, the moisturiser that itemised every ingredient.
When the benchmark is every category simultaneously, price loses its authority as a proxy for quality. The functional gap between premium and mid-market has narrowed across almost every category. What separates brands that gain loyalty versus more transactional brands is a genuine feeling that this was made for a person, not a market segment.
Design for the long hello
For Gen Z, buying items that last isn’t idealism; it’s just good economics. Permanence for this group isn’t indulgence, it makes common sense.
Capgemini found that 89% of consumers name durability as a guiding factor across categories, but thrift isn’t driving that, it’s a question: will this purchase still mean something in five years’ time?
Design something worth keeping and keeping becomes its own reward. Stanley took the everyday drinks cup and redesigned it around permanence: a lifetime warranty, a vessel weighted and finished to signal durability. A pleasant surprise for Stanley was that once people owned one cup, they wanted more.
The practical consideration for any brand should hinge on whether the packaging can earn a place in the home once the product is gone. Loewe's ceramic candle holders give a clear answer: the vessel outlasts the product by design, not by accident.
Own the specific, not the broad
The cultural authority that once came from being universally recognisable has shifted away from reach towards rootedness. What Gen Z reads as credibility isn't scale but depth.
Gen Z consumers use products to signal who they are. A brand speaking their specific cultural language earns something a globally optimised visual system cannot: the feeling of being seen rather than targeted.
The most culturally intelligent brands aren't adapting. They're building from the culture, not towards it. Indian chocolate brand Subko runs its packaging in Devanagari and Kannada and traces every ingredient to a named farm. That local specificity is the product. Gully Labs builds sneakers as collectible documents of modern Indian street culture, gaining global traction precisely because of how rooted they are, not despite it. Cultural authority comes from depth, not reach. A brand that genuinely belongs somewhere will always outperform a brand trying to belong everywhere.
Make the encounter the brief
Shelf performance used to be the primary design brief but now the product also performs in the bathroom, at the table, or in the corner of a photo. It exists in a permanent state of being seen by someone other than its buyer. Gen Z shops with that in mind.
Deloitte data puts 47% of consumers in the category of active value-seekers: people who require a product to justify itself socially. Being worth the price and worth being seen with are equally weighted criteria.
Rhode's phone case embodies this shift. The product sits on a phone, appears in every selfie, and generates media without a media budget. 818 Tequila designed a miniature keychain bottle: an accessory first, a product second. Both brands understood that the encounter is the marketing. Design for it intentionally.
Lead with the true thing
Density of claims used to mean quality: if a brand had a lot to say, it must be worth it. Now restraint is a statement of confidence, and saying less is a premium signal. The Ordinary skincare products name the active ingredient and state the concentration; there’s no narrative or lifestyle imagery. Its clinical type and bare packaging trust consumers to know what they are buying. In the same category, Drunk Elephant built its identity around a public exclusion list: six ingredient categories it will not use. It’s defined by what it removes, not what it adds. That’s radical clarity delivered with personality.
Bake conviction into the brief
Each of these shifts signals something significant about the brand. Building for permanence means believing in your product, while leading with ingredients means transparency.
None of this requires a luxury price point. It needs conviction baked into the brief, not applied as a layer at the end. The brands getting this right didn't arrive at it through execution. They started from it.
For more, see why brands need to ditch the monolithic Gen Z concept.
