Frugality, climate and K-pop: The new cultural economics of Gen Z

Gen Z and Gen Alpha are reshaping India's consumption culture around Jap-Kor influences, minimalism and frugality, posing a new challenge for brands

Last year, Pilot, the leading Japanese stationery products company, opened its first exclusive brand outlet anywhere in the world in an upscale neighbourhood market in Gurugram. In the age of all things digital, it is the most analogue move one can think of, but that’s beside the point. The moot point is that this store sits in the company of a ramen noodle bar that is styled on a popular concept in downtown Tokyo. The noodle bar is a hole in the wall that has a wait time of more than ten minutes on most weekends, if you fancy a squeeze into it. 

From Disney to Duolingo:The rise of Jap-Kor Stroll around in the same market to spot a Japanese doughnut place throbbing with Gen-Z and a self-ramen Korean bar where you can cook your own instant noodles that is always buzzing with pre-teens and their unwilling parents figuring a way around the concept. Korean is the fourth most accessed language on Duolingo in India after English, Hindi and French. Last year, Nykaa reported that Korean brands’ gross merchandise value grew at 58 per cent year-on-year on its platform. Ten per cent of the global fan-base of Hallyu (the Korean wave, a term that signifies K-pop, K-food, and films) of 150 million-plus fans resides in India. 

The rising influence of Jap-Kor (Japanese and Korean) subculture, beyond automobiles, on the Indian consuming class has been in the works since the early 2000s. It started with the satellite TV that wedded dubbed Japanese cartoons with the telly-time of school children and kids of that generation. They are now the Gen-Zs who are finishing colleges, hunting for jobs, or starting to earn their bread. They have graduated from cartoons-for-kids to K-pop and Japanese anime. This transition passed the baton in kids’ entertainment to the next generation, which is consuming content from Korean and Japanese influencers talking about everything from Instaramen to nail art. 

India has lived through a similar cycle of a foreign culture with an all-American cast of characters — from Disney cartoons to the make-believe world of WWF, and from Hollywood sitcoms to romanticising Wall Street. We saw this play out with food becoming on-the-go and fashion becoming label-conscious. In less than a decade since 1991, we saw this manifest in Americanism taking a fair slice of India’s consumption story from merchandise to services. The questions to ask are: Why is the generation of Zs and Alphas not imbibing Americanism with the same fervour as their parents, and is the Jap-Kor of Gen Z and Gen Alpha all set to replace the Americanism of the millennials? 

Peak Americanism and the Trump-era pivot 

The dominance of American culture was slotted into neat triggers of consumption synced up with the business successes of American corporations under a tight supervision of geopolitics and technological dominance. In the Trumpian order of things, characterised by anti-immigrant rhetoric, an arc of diplomatic relationship that is distinctly transactional, and the disruption caused by AI, the proximity to Americanism has itself retreated. In physical terms, it means fewer people in the workforce from India headed to the US on H1Bs and fewer students in Gurgaon, Delhi, and Bengaluru dreaming of an American university campus life after school. 

But, more than physical, this retreat is also one of mind-share, in which the American movies that were the last word on rom-com and drama, American MBAs that were the solution-template for everything with a problem statement, American superheroes that were the go-to saviour for the world in crisis, and American fast food that was the chic meal to look cool are now showing cracks. Fast food is getting scrutinised for its adverse impact on public health. American entertainment has moved into telling stories of metaphysical and dystopian worlds, if not showing the opioid crisis and broken families in an average American home. American MBAs don’t offer the same return on investment, and American superheroes emit geriatric vibes. 

Beyond burgers: The new cultural diet 

This retreating American culture is giving birth to a simmering counter-trend that seeks equally able alternatives to fill the void, and such a profound shift is playing out right at the time when Zs and Alphas are getting warmed up to take up the reins of the world. Likely Jap-Kor cultural levers are filling this space with gore, romance, and noir in entertainment, with soup bowls and chopsticks in food, gloss and glitter in beauty, and linen mixes and relaxed fits in fashion. 

In 2025, South Korea overtook the US to become the world’s second-largest exporter of beauty and personal care products after France. Japan is the third-largest entertainment content exporter and, outside of the US, Korean content is the largest viewed on Netflix globally. These trends do suggest that Jap-Kor is already competing with the Americanism that we all know. 

Climate anxiety and the shift to frugality 

Heightened awareness of the environment and climate change is a force-multiplier that is also pushing itself into this void and creating its own sub-culture among the Zs and Alphas. Loss of biodiversity, heat shocks, flash floods, and pollution stress are not only about short-term shocks but longer-term psychological shifts that confront the new generation with an impressionable mind. 

Consequently, a new language that seeks minimalism, understatement, fraternity, sharing, frugality, and irreverence appears in the lingua franca of the Zs and Alphas. 

The gig economy and K-shaped reality 

The economic disparity that confronts the new generation with a K-shaped reality can’t be ignored for its cultural implications too, and one that is bound to spiral down into consumption choices. Employment is already becoming gig-based, and temporary hirings are becoming more permanent. Gig workers now account for 2.2 per cent  of the workforce in India. Between 2021 and 2025, the number of people earning more than ~100 crore in annual income rose from 150 to 520. But the average salary earned by an Indian person with a permanent job in 2025 stood at ~250,000, which is also the average price of a luxury watch sold by a watch retailer whose sales have grown at a CAGR of 33 per cent and profit at a CAGR of 83 per cent between 2021 and 2026. 

The net addition of new jobs in the IT sector of India in the first half of 2026 has remained flat in comparison with what it was in FY 25, at around 135,000. This is in a sector that gives direct employment to nearly six million people. Globally, too, with the advent of AI and even before, the white-collar employment pool is getting smaller and greyer. Auto majors in Europe have retrenched the employee count by nearly 240,000 in FY26 — and that is nearly 10 per cent of the total workforce employed directly by auto companies in the whole of Europe — amid increasing threat from Chinese EVs. 

These economic realities are starkly different from the millennials who grew up at a time of great certainty and with a fair chance for upward mobility. 

Therefore, the cultural identities of the millennials that were about individuality, flair, assertion, and confidence, and that reflected the economic and lived realities of that era, will be replaced with identities that signify sharing, frugality, minimalism, irreverence, or even nihilism for the Gen Zs and Alphas. 

It is not so much about the win of Jap-Kor over Americanism as it is about reading this shift as a change of guard from an American-influenced identity to one that is more country-neutral and seeks more solidarity and universality amidst the realities of climate change and economic uncertainties. 

It so happens that Jap-Kor cultural identities now are perceived to be most aligned with the change. 

This is bound to have implications on consumer businesses and the growth capital they seek to invest in the Indian consumption story. This may mean everything from the colour choices that the new generation will prefer on the packaging box to the understated tones they will seek in their relaxed fit trousers and polos. They will seek minimalism and subtlety in home decor and bowl meals with more proteins and fewer carbs. They will ditch that shade of lipstick from their mom’s era in favour of more gloss and seek the latest collectible of watches made from recyclable material or solar-powered cells over an American power brand. 

The boardroom challenge for Indian brands 

When market opportunities are sized into large datasets, such macro cultural shifts are quickly stereotyped into major/micro trends for a tactical interpretation, if not ignored as a passing fad or both, and in doing so we may be missing the wood for the trees. 

The question is how much of these signals are getting unpacked in the boardrooms of Indian companies for inferences that are beyond their explicit and tactical cues. 

How much of the datasets on consumer and market research are investigated beyond numbers and dissected for long-term implications or to trigger innovation and research? Indian brands and businesses have a choice to make. One of them is to merely sit on the boundary line and let a disruptive event roll over their business plans, just like the country’s politicians in power recently learned about the mannerism and values of Gen Zs and Gen Alphas. The other is to get up, take note of this shift and act on it.

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The writer is a senior partner at The Knowledge Company, and the author of Wasted: The Messy Story of Sanitation in India, A Manifesto for Change (Pan Macmillan; 2019). His X handle is: @AnkurBisen1