Brand Love, Redefined by Gen Z and Millennials — Is Your Loyalty Program Keeping Up?
Let’s get this out of the way: nobody is queuing up to collect a free smoothie on their 10th purchase. Not Gen Z, Not Millennials, not in 2025. Back then, loyalty looked like a stamp card and a “happy birthday” email.
Today? Your audience wears oversized headphones, has an alt-TikTok account, and makes buying decisions based on vibes, values, and whether your brand has meme potential.
So, if you’re still hoping that cashback points and a promo code will buy you brand affection, I’ve got bad news: you’re playing checkers while your audience is deep into 4D chess.
Let’s examine modern loyalty and how food and beverage brands can maintain it.
1. Loyalty Now Looks Like Identity
Today’s young consumers are both product consumers and social consumers. Everything they post, wear, eat, and drink reflects their narrative. So when someone grabs your product off the shelf, they’re not thinking, “Oh nice, I’ll earn points for this.” They’re thinking, “Do I want to be seen with this in my hand?”
Take Liquid Death, for example. It’s just water. But they dressed it in tallboy cans, used a heavy metal logo, and built a brand around “murdering your thirst.”
2. Community Over Coupons
Loyalty cards feel transactional. Don’t get it wrong; coupons are still alive and active, but building a community improves how your brand is perceived, and a community feels emotional.
And in a world where loneliness is an epidemic, and content is splitting attention and improving anxiety, people are gravitating to brands that make them feel like they belong to something bigger.
The real loyalty flex isn’t who has the best reward programme. It’s who is building the best tribe. Contact us for growth strategies to improve your food and beverage industry’s share of voice and relevance.
3. The Content-Led Loyalty Loop
Every scroll is a chance to win (or lose) loyalty. Gen Z and Millennials follow brands the same way they follow creators, looking for story, sass, and substance. You’re not competing with Coca-Cola. You’re competing with content. Imagine how Gen Z is glued to Red Bull stunts; the content keeps them engaged.
4. Ethical Clout and Conscious Choices
Here’s the new equation: Values = Value.
Gen Z especially wants brands that care about something, not just in a performative, World-Environment-Day-tweet way.
They want transparency, accountability, and ethics baked into every part of the process:
- What are your ingredients?
- Who’s on your board?
- What causes do you champion, even when it’s inconvenient?
In the UK, Minor Figures (an oat milk brand) leverages its B-Corp status and climate-first messaging to earn absolute respect. Loyalty also rides on principle.
5. Experience-Led Loyalty: Touch, Taste, Tell
Remember those fizzy drinks you had as a kid that only tasted amazing at parties? That’s because experience builds memory. And memory builds loyalty.
Here are memories people are creating with their food and beverage products.
- Set up a vending machine that only takes voice notes.
- Create a drink-testing that opens for 24 hours only.
- Partner with a food truck for a one-night-only “secret menu” Collab.
These are the stories people tell. These are the “you had to be there” moments that turn casual buyers into brand missionaries.
So, What’s the Play Here?
The new loyalty is earned on socials, not the checkout counter.
To win over Gen Z and Millennials, your brand has to do more than offer incentives. It needs to:
- Mirror their identity.
- Nurture their belonging.
- Show up in their feeds.
- Stand for something real.
- Give them unforgettable memories.
Loyalty today is not a transaction. It’s a shared experience.
And if you want help building the kind of great-following that no amount of media spend can fake that’s where we come in.
At Intense Group, we don’t just do marketing. We build movements around you
