As marketing and brand strategies increasingly shift online to engage digitally led younger audiences, brands can’t afford to lose relevance with older, less digitally driven segments. Success lies in recognising – and strategically responding to – generational differences within the market.
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Millennials and Gen X represent the most fertile ground in the switching economy
3/5 of New Zealanders claim they are open to trying new brands or products if they seem interesting. Millennials and Gen X are the most open (67% avg.) while Boomers and (interestingly) Gen Z are the least likely (49% and 45% respectively).
What draws consumers to your brand (or a competitor’s) varies generationally. For Gen Z, price and value are key. When a brand delivers on this, the percentage of Gen Zs open to trial jumps from 45% to 84%. While price is still important for other generations, quality and performance is also prominent with 34% considering it over price (vs. 15% of Gen Z).
As a general rule, value-based acquisition strategies aimed at younger consumers represent best bang for buck. Retaining customers, particularly locking in Boomers, requires serious investment in customer experience excellence and establishing trust, especially when it comes to security and service quality. Even more, having customers who advocate for the brand is a springboard to acquiring older consumers.
Personalisation means different things to different generations, and getting this wrong can alienate customers
Boomers strongly value personalised service; they want to talk to staff, visit physical branches or make purchases in-store. However, when it comes to personalised offers, only 46% of Boomers view these as important, compared to 91% of Gen Z.
More critically, 27% of Boomers find personalised offers invasive (versus 12% overall). No doubt personalisation is critical to serving customers and standing out, but it calls for defining and catering to preferences on two general tracks.
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Data-driven personalised offers for Gen Z and Millennials (e.g., targeted promotions, rewards and recommendations).
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Personalised high-touch service for Gen X and Boomers (in-person service, human phone support and physical presence).
Think carefully before closing branches, reducing phone support or going digital-only as you may be alienating your most loyal customers.
Advancing tech has already reshaped how some of us are making purchase decisions
When researching a product or service, we all undoubtedly end up online at some point before making a purchase decision. Most commonly, we visit professionally generated platforms such as price comparison websites or websites of the brands we’re interested in.
1 in 5 New Zealanders are now using tools like ChatGPT or Claude during this process. The younger the shopper the more likely they are to do so, peaking at 1/3 of Gen Zs. As yet, this hasn’t fundamentally changed the importance of brand when it comes to ‘discovery and delight’. In retail only 3% of New Zealanders use AI tools to discover new products or brands.
In-store experiences and brand communities (both real world and online) still matter.
Read more: How faster, smarter market research is changing the insights industry
AI’s potential to ‘remove’ the consumer from the purchase journey will increasingly reshape how we experience brands
As AI solutions become more sophisticated and more mainstream, businesses will need to rethink their presence in market. For instance, the introduction of agentic AI in New Zealand (while still in very formative stages) has the potential to make shopping quicker and easier by handling every aspect of the purchase journey from research and recommendations to final purchase.
Businesses need to consider how this will affect where they show up. If AI is making the recommendations to a potential customer, are you on that recommendation short list?
While brand love and loyalty will continue to exist, the future may see it taking a very different shape.
Read more: Why Voice of Customer matters more with the rise of generative search
Download our full Trends in NZ Consumer Behaviour report for more detailed insights into specific categories, how AI is changing shopping behaviour, and what these behaviour shifts mean for brands and marketers in 2026.
