Could communities become the next marketing brief after Gen Z?

For the better part of the last decade, Gen Z became one of marketing’s favourite answers. Want to look relevant? Target Gen Z. Want to crack culture? Understand Gen Z. Want to know what people are watching, buying, wearing or talking about? You guessed it: Gen Z!

But somewhere along the way, the label started doing a little too much heavy lifting. And a few marketers started feeling it. Recently, we’ve started seeing brands approach audiences a little differently. Brands are calling in padel players for community-building events. Lifestyle brands are bringing matcha lovers under one roof. Fashion brands are building around sneakerheads, beauty brands around skincare obsessives, and food brands around people united by a very specific taste.

“For a while, Gen Z became the answer to almost every marketing question. But Gen Z is a demographic, not a mindset. Two 22-year-olds can have absolutely nothing in common beyond their age. What we are seeing now is a move towards understanding what people care about, what they participate in and what they identify with. That's where communities naturally emerge. So, for me, the brief hasn't really moved from Gen Z to community. It has moved from audience to affinity,” said Akshika Poddar, Co-Founder, The House of Rare.

That distinction may be at the heart of where brand targeting is headed.

For Nidhi Rastogi, Marketing Head, UNIQLO India, this shift is already showing up in the way marketers think about media planning. “When we are looking at media planning, we are not saying target 25-45 audience. It's absolutely interest-based, attitude-based. And I think that's the big shift that has happened in the way marketers are thinking about reaching customers,” she said. The distinction is important. A demographic tells a marketer who someone is. An interest can begin to tell them why they might care.

When age stopped being enough

The shift away from demographics is not necessarily because demographics have become irrelevant. Rather, marketers are increasingly recognising that they provide only the starting point. “That is where community becomes important. People want to identify with something, participate in it and feel like the brand understands the world they are part of,” said Chetan Siyal, Founding Member & CMO, SNITCH.

Aviral Gupta, CEO, Zostel, sees the same issue through the lens of behaviour rather than age. “Gen Z was always a convenient label, easy to brief, easy to sell internally but a 19-year-old backpacker in Rishikesh and a 26-year-old backpacker in Goa want very different things from us, even if they fall under the same generational bracket,” he said.

The implication is that marketers may need to think beyond a consumer's generation and towards the behaviours, motivations and interests that actually shape their choices.

The technology finally caught up with the strategy

Interestingly, interest-based targeting itself is hardly a new idea. Sajit Gopal, Head of Media at Jubilant FoodWorks Ltd., argued that marketers have wanted to target consumers based on interests for years. The problem was that they did not have the technology to do it at scale. “The aspiration to target people of interest was always there. Every planner has wanted that. What stopped us was technology,” he said.

“Because we couldn't observe interest at scale, we did the next best thing. We clustered people into groups by age, income and geography, and then assigned that cluster a set of assumed characteristics. SEC A, 18 to 24, metro, and we would attach a personality to it that no actual individual in that group necessarily had. That was always a workaround, never a philosophy. What AI and the current tech stack have changed is that we can now execute on the ground what used to only exist as a slide in a strategy deck. The interest-led plan was on deck fifteen years ago. It simply couldn't be bought,” Gopal said.

That is perhaps one of the more significant shifts beneath the current community conversation. The industry is not necessarily abandoning segmentation. It is gaining the ability to make segmentation more granular.

But more granular targeting also comes with a new problem. If marketers can identify thousands of interests, should brands attempt to participate in all of them?

Probably not.

“The shift is happening at scale, but I wouldn’t say the industry has completely moved away from demographics to interest. It’s just that demographics are no longer enough today. However, it’s important for brands to remember not to chase every interest. We need to identify the spaces where our brand is a genuine fit and then bring in a clear point of view. That’s how relevance becomes community participation,” said Tamisha Sajnani, Director, Integrated Brand Marketing, KFC India. That caveat could prove increasingly important as the community conversation becomes more mainstream.

From attention to belonging

The attraction of communities becomes clearer when compared with the traditional economics of influencer marketing. Influencers can deliver reach, discovery and cultural visibility. Communities promise something less immediate but potentially more enduring: participation.

“An influencer gives you attention and a community gives you belief. A community led approach helps create a relationship between the consumer and the brand, and importantly, between consumers themselves. The real value is that you get people who voluntarily talk about you, bring other people into the conversation and give you feedback because they actually care about what you are building,” said Poddar.

Gupta offers an even more pointed distinction. “An influencer campaign rents attention. A community earns advocacy,” he said.

But for brands, the opportunity may not be advocacy alone. A community can become a source of consumer intelligence too. “When you are part of a community, you are involved in the day-to-day. That is the difference, and it isn't only a marketing benefit,” said Gopal.

“An influencer is a personal channel, but a one-way one. Someone talks, a large number of people listen, the campaign ends. A community is consistent two-way interaction. It runs whether or not you have something to sell that week. The part that gets undervalued is what it does for research. A live community is the fastest sentiment read you will get. You see how people talk about the category unprompted, you catch a product problem in days rather than at the end of a quarter, and you can test an idea before it becomes an expensive one. The payoff isn't a single thing. Advocacy and retention are the visible part. The listening is the part that quietly changes what you make and how you sell it,” he added.

That potentially changes the role of community from a communications tool to a broader business asset. Instead of simply asking whether a community generates engagement, brands could be asking whether it improves their understanding of consumers, informs product decisions and creates a feedback loop that traditional campaign-based marketing cannot.

But can every brand really build a community?

There is, however, a danger in the community conversation becoming another marketing shorthand. If Gen Z could once be reduced to a campaign featuring young creators, internet slang and trending formats, “community” could similarly become a label attached to WhatsApp groups, events and social followers.

The marketers interviewed for this story are more cautious. “Community can absolutely become a moat, but only if it is real. Putting customers into a WhatsApp group, hosting an event or calling your followers a community does not automatically create one. A real community has a shared identity and a reason to exist beyond the transaction. The brand becomes part of how people express themselves or connect with others. That is when it becomes difficult for competitors to replicate, because products can be copied, campaigns can be copied and even pricing can be copied. A genuine relationship between a brand and its consumers is much harder to reproduce,” said Siyal.

Sajnani approaches the question from another angle: community cannot simply be made into a marketing objective. “I do think community can become a real long-term advantage for brands. But you can’t build a community by setting ‘community’ as a marketing KPI. It will always be the outcome of doing a few things consistently, understanding what consumers genuinely care about, having a clear point of view and giving people reasons to engage with you beyond just buying your product,” she said. That also explains why some of India's more interesting community-led marketing efforts are emerging around specific cultural behaviours rather than broad age groups.

The rise of the micro-community

If the move from demographics to interests is already underway, the next logical step could be even narrower communities. Rastogi expects exactly that. “We will have even more micro-communities. People's interests are going to get more specific. It's going to get more niche. And how do you then appeal to even those niche segments? It is not just about fitness. It will be about a paddle community. It is not just about coffee. It's a matcha community. So there are so many sub-micro-communities which will develop,” she said.

That shift is already visible in India. Brands and platforms have increasingly begun creating or partnering with ecosystems built around specific interests rather than attempting to address an entire generation. The significance is that these communities can provide something broad demographic targeting cannot: a shared cultural language.

But brands do not necessarily have to own those communities. They may simply need to earn the right to participate in them. “For a long time, brands thought about consumers as people they needed to reach. Now, the more interesting question is whether the brand has earned the right to participate in a particular culture or community,” said Poddar.

That changes the marketer's role. The question is no longer simply whether a brand can buy access to an audience. It is whether the audience sees a legitimate reason for the brand to be there.

Is niche the new route to scale?

There is a seeming contradiction at the heart of community marketing. Marketers traditionally sought scale. Communities, by definition, can begin small. But that may not be a contradiction at all. Siyal argued that brands should first build depth before chasing breadth.

“I think the next phase of brand building will be less about chasing the largest possible audience and more about creating a very strong relationship with a specific group first. Culture usually spreads from smaller, highly engaged groups outward. If a brand becomes meaningful inside the right community, scale often follows naturally. The mistake is trying to look culturally relevant to everyone from day one. Strong brands usually become broad by first being deeply relevant to someone,” he said.

It is not necessarily that mass audiences are becoming irrelevant. It is that mass relevance may increasingly be built from smaller pockets of genuine relevance. And that also changes the definition of what it means for a brand to “go beyond Gen Z”. The answer may not be to simply add millennials, Gen Alpha or older consumers to the targeting matrix. It may be to build something that consumers can continue to identify with as they move through different life stages.

What comes after the Gen Z brief?

The Gen Z label is unlikely to disappear from media plans or marketing conversations anytime soon. It remains a useful demographic marker and an important commercial audience. But its limitations are becoming harder to ignore. As Poddar puts it: “Brands need to stop building around generations and start building around passions.”

Perhaps the strongest brands of the next decade will be those that stop asking which generation they belong to, and start asking which culture has given them permission to belong!