Shagorika Heryani

This week, Deccan Herald published my piece on how "life is increasingly staged for the feed."





What began as social sharing has quietly become social proof. Restaurants engineered for photographs. Vacations reverse-designed for narrative. Experiences turning into evidence.





The column explores the everyday version of this shift. The deeper question I keep unravelling, like a ball of string, is this:






When life becomes content, how does that reshape identity, status, and consumption? Yes, it’s performative. But what is the real itch we’re trying to scratch?

Have a read :) Below is the article and here's a link www.deccanherald.com/opinion/when-life-is-staged-f…

2 days ago | [YT] | 3

Shagorika Heryani

India just hosted its most ambitious AI summit. 20 heads of state. 100+ countries.

And the moment everyone remembers is a robot dog from China that was 'presented' as in-house innovation by an Indian university.



Galgotias University showed up with a Unitree Go2, a commercially available robot worth about INR 2–3 lakhs, renamed it Orion, and their Professor told reporters on national television that Orion was developed by their Centre of Excellence. The internet identified the sham within hours. The rest is history and Galgotias is forever part of India’s meme lore.But Galgotias didn't invent this playbook. They just got caught doing what the entire ecosystem has been rewarded for.


Remember when every consultant became a "Digital Transformation Expert" overnight? When every founder had a blockchain use case? When every brand needed a metaverse strategy?


Now everyone has an AI product. An AI service. An AI philosophy. At this point, we are doing tech cosplay.



Amazon built its "Just Walk Out" cashierless stores, hailed as AI powered retail until reporting revealed they ran the store with a team of humans in India watching camera feeds and tagging transactions manually.



Builder.ai raised $445 million from Microsoft and Qatar's sovereign wealth fund on the promise of an AI that could build apps autonomously. Behind "Natasha," the AI assistant, were 700 engineers doing the work.



Moltbook went viral in January 2026 as "the social network where AI agents talk to each other." Andrej Karpathy called it "the most incredible sci-fi takeoff." MIT Technology Review confirmed the most dramatic posts, the ones about AI consciousness, AI rebellion, AI forming secret societies were written by humans marketing their own apps.



Four stories. Four different industries. Same script. These aren't edge cases. They're just the ones that got exposed.



Because the market built this. AI-first companies command valuations that make revenue multiples look secondary. Institutional money moves toward the signal before the substance exists. The incentive to perform capability rather than build it has never been higher or better funded.



And the machinery feeding it is enormous. Media needs the AI story. Platforms want content at scale. Courses sell AI transformation. Coaches sell AI mindset. Creators build audiences on AI fear and AI promise in equal measure. The ecosystem runs on signal as much as substance.



I frequently get asked to add "AI-First Marketer" to my LinkedIn profile and company credentials. The question isn’t what I am building with AI. The pressure is to perform the label. That’s the tell.



When the badge matters more than the capability, we’re not in an innovation cycle anymore. We’re in a signaling cycle. And signaling cycles don’t produce breakthroughs, they produce Orions. They produce Natashas.



The tragedy isn’t deception alone. It’s that the signal has become so loud that genuine capability struggles to be heard without sounding like more noise.

3 days ago | [YT] | 1

Shagorika Heryani

“I don’t know where my money goes.”



I heard some version of this repeatedly over the holidays from Gen Z relatives and younger colleagues. These aren’t irresponsible people. They have careers. Salaries. Tracking apps. And yet, constant financial stretch.



The contradiction sent me digging into the Gen Z debt crisis in India.

India was built on a simple money logic:
Save first. Delay pleasure. Buy assets.



That logic is breaking.

Gen Z knows saving matters (91% say it does). Yet the numbers tell a different story:

– Unsecured personal loans are the fastest-growing credit category in India
– Defaults are rising most sharply in loans under ₹50,000
– BNPL has moved from a convenience product to a $25 billion market in under a decade
– A growing share of young borrowers are servicing EMIs before they’ve built any assets at all



This isn't ignorance or them being bad about money. Here's the context.



Gen Z inherited an economy their parents don’t recognise:
• First financial memory: the 2008 crisis
• Early adulthood: a pandemic
• Real wages lagging the cost of living
• Housing drifting out of reach year after year



The promise was: Work hard. Save. Buy security. The reality is: Even with a job, you’re living paycheck to paycheck. So behaviour adapts. Debt is no longer used to build assets. It’s used to build visibility and identity.


Travel. iPhones. Experiences. Signals that say: ‘I’m still moving forward. I am still aspirational’ or ‘I may never afford a house, but I can afford to signal I belong.’ And BNPL makes this infinitely possible, or so they think.



₹40,000 for a flight feels irresponsible.
₹499 x endless EMIs feels rational, a smart decision to have a life worth living.



Having worked in lendtech, I’ve seen how this happens. When credit becomes instant, invisible, and emotional. Debt stops feeling like a risk and starts feeling like infrastructure. Here’s the big shift. Gen Z is the first generation 'financing identity at scale.' They will not be the last. When wages stall, assets disappear, and security becomes abstract, identity becomes the only thing people can still build.

On credit.



This not a phase. That’s the early shape of a consumer debt cycle we’re only beginning to understand.

5 days ago | [YT] | 1

Shagorika Heryani

Gen Z just broke a 100-year streak. They're the first generation to score lower on IQ tests than their parents.



Cue the panic and the experts. "Screens are rotting brains." "Technology ruined a generation." "The tests are outdated."



There's merit in all of it, but what I keep thinking about is what this means for how Gen Z buy. Every generation is shaped by its information diet.



Boomers → broadcast (one-to-many, you watch & absorb)
Millennials → search (you ask, Google answers)
Gen Z → feed (the algorithm decides what you see next)



For the first time, a generation's cognitive trainer wasn't a teacher or parent. It was a recommendation engine. If your brain is trained by systems optimized for engagement, you develop different strengths: rapid pattern recognition over deep memory, visual fluency over linear reading, parallel processing over sequential thinking. And that reshapes how they buy.



Gen Z doesn't read your 'about' page. Their eyes scan: logo, comments section, "3,847 people bought this." Research shows 56% can recall an ad they saw for under 2 seconds, double the rate of people over 40. That scan takes a few seconds. Either something clicks or they move on. They don't store product details. Why would they? It's all retrievable. But show them your brand's visual language twice, same palette, same design style, and their brain goes, "I know this brand."



Here's their purchase journey: TikTok open. Your website open. Reddit thread about your category open. Thumb hovering over checkout. All at once. They're not distracted. This is just how they process information now.



We talk about brand loyalty. What they often have is feed loyalty. 32% of Gen Z abandoned a brand in the last 12 months, the highest of any generation. Boredom, price, a competitor going viral, one bad experience. The threshold for leaving is just lower. What builds trust isn't your brand video. It's that the algorithm surfaced you, and the comments feel real. A glossy ad barely registers. A messy, unfiltered reel from a creator with 8,000 followers? That converts.

So what changes? The funnel still exists. But they experience it like a pinball game, not a slide. All stages happen at once. Which means your awareness post needs conversion potential, and your retargeting ad needs to introduce your brand.


Storytelling still works. But they're not reading your manifesto. They're catching fragments. Your story has to make sense in pieces. Visual language often does more narrative work than words.



What shifts?
Recognition > recall
Recurrence > memorability
Parallel experience > sequential funnel



The algorithm mediates access now more than media budget does. You're marketing through a system as much as you're marketing to people. This isn't a generational story. It's an environmental one. Where do you see the biggest mismatch between how brands operate and how people actually move through decisions now?

1 week ago | [YT] | 1

Shagorika Heryani

Why Luxury Moved from Your Closet to Your Calendar.


Dior, Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Armani, Gucci. The most heritage obsessed brands in the world are also in the business of cafés, restaurants, and hospitality. This isn't a trend. It's luxury solving for a future they saw coming.



Economic truth: Acquisition capital is squeezed. Gen Z is navigating gig work and delayed wealth. Millennials are caught between debt and housing costs. The traditional handbag entry point requires a different kind of financial confidence than it did a decade ago.



Psychological truth: Bain-Altagamma tracked a "tectonic shift" toward luxury experiences and away from traditional luxury goods. Consumers globally now favor "experiential indulgence" over "conspicuous consumption" as new symbols of status. Experiences weave into identity in ways possessions never could. A bag sits in your closet. A ritual becomes part of who you are. It's no longer "look what I bought." It's "look where I've been."



Social truth: The Instagram and TikTok economy rewrote status signaling. Posting a luxury purchase makes you look materialistic. Posting a luxury experience signals cultivation, taste, cultural fluency. Experiential consumption doesn't just signal wealth. It signals warmth.



Luxury brands didn't fight these truths. They architected an entirely new business model around them. Walk into Café Dior and you're purchasing 90 minutes of total sensory immersion. Cloud-shaped mirrors overhead. A millefeuille with the logo baked into the pastry, served on Dior tableware. Coach turned its $395 Tabby bag into a $12 cake. Not as a gimmick. As strategy.



The logic is simple, ritual frequency beats transaction intensity.



Buy a Kelly bag once every few years? That's one moment of connection to Hermès. But visit their café monthly? That's regular immersion in Hermès orange, surrounded by their packaging, absorbing their brand codes. Each visit makes the brand feel less aspirational, more familiar. Hermès tracked what happened next. 60% of café guests bought from the store within three months. Because after sitting in that space repeatedly, the brand stopped feeling like an impossible leap. It felt like the natural next step in a blossoming relationship.



This is luxury's most elegant insight: they changed where the relationship begins.



It no longer starts with the purchase. It starts with the ritual. Status relocated from closet to calendar. From what you own to where you belong.

The brands that understood this earliest didn't wait for economic conditions to improve or for Gen Z to age into wealth. They met aspiration exactly where it could afford to show up and are building loyalty years before purchasing power arrived.

The café isn't a revenue expansion play. It's the most sophisticated customer acquisition strategy luxury has ever built.



#BrandPsychology #LuxuryRetail #ConsumerPsychology #CulturalIntelligence #AthinaDecode #ShagorikaHeryani

1 week ago | [YT] | 1