For decades, marketers believed story came first. Today, a new generation has flipped the script: the product speaks first, the brand follows.
What drives brand love today? For younger consumers, the answer starts with product. Gen Z is reshaping the credit card market, expecting their card to be more thanjust a means of payment.
They want simplicity, design that doubles as self-expression, and a digital experience that feels like second nature.
Cashback is the starting point, but what they are really after is a product that helps them build their financial identity, safely, transparently, and with a touch of personalization.
That’s where we see the contrast: Millennials have mastered the rewards game, moving seamlessly between points, perks, and partnerships. Gen Z is just entering the arena, but with very different instincts. Winning with them means rethinking how the product shows up in their daily lives before the brand narrative takes hold.
Fulcrum Question: How do you build a brand that feels premium when your youngest customers believe the product itself is the brand?
“Brand Follows Product” is a bold statement, and for the readers of this newsletter, who are mainly marketing executives, perhaps even a controversial one. Yet theevidence is mounting. The next generation of consumers is not waiting to be told what a brand stands for: they are deciding for themselves based on how the product shows up in their daily lives.
This is not a generational quirk. It is the early signal of astructural shift in how loyalty is earned and how brands are built.
The key points are clear. First, loyalty is being built less through storytelling and more through utility. Second, design and digital experience have become extensions of personal identity. Third, premium is no longer just a price pointbut a signal of purpose and belonging.
If the product itself is the brand, then the real challenge is not crafting the narrative after launch but engineering the product so that it tells the story from the start.
This is both a shift in mindset and a call to action. Ask yourself: is your brand still leading with story, or is your product ready to speak for itself?