POV: “The Alphas are coming” and we’re already understanding them wrong

“Engage with your future consumers, deliver thought leadership, build and future proof brands.” Throw a stone online and you’ll hit a guide on how to market to young teenagers. Search for Gen Alpha insights on Google and you’ll likely stumble across a 2024 piece by Forbes about the importance of influencer marketing for “reaching” this new generation, complete with stats on how they’ll shop and consume in the future (for example, that 49 per cent of kids trust influencers as much as their own family for product recommendations). Brands are hearing a story about their newest consumer group, while half of these consumers are still shedding baby teeth.

That story is that they are digitally-native. They use Drunk Elephant make-up products. They find guidance on YouTube. They trust influencers over their friends – they have no friends, in fact. As these stories bed in our consciousness across culture, marketers have been eager to mark them down in pen as fixed consumer traits, rather than asking how these stories might change as they mature. And beyond the morally queasy feeling this content might raise (the idea of marketers “raising the trust” of youngsters online is a frequent recommendation in Gen Alpha think pieces), this strategy encourages a certain copy-and-paste approach to communication that looks likely to steer us wrong.

That’s at least the opinion of Lawrence Zeegen, director of the Creative Computing Institute at UAL and founder of Meet Generation Alpha: “I think the marketing industry has chiefly to date approached Gen Alpha solely as future consumers and to do that has been to miss the point – way wide of the mark. Gaining insights into Gen Alpha will have to depend on much more than what we can sell them – their lives will be about so much more than simply accumulating more stuff!”

That doesn’t mean that research into this generation should stop, though. Lawrence says our Generation Alpha interest is essential, with recent population data showing that Gen Alpha is already one in seven on the planet, outnumbering boomers in just three years, and making up 25 per cent of the global population by 2030. For Lawrence, this understanding will have ripple effects far beyond consumer culture, through to how we shape our workforces, our education settings, and even how older audiences – us – experience the world.

When speaking to Lawrence, one statement on jobs particularly puts this in perspective. “Many [members of Generation Alpha] will live into the 22nd century, and will likely work in fields that don’t yet exist – just a decade ago we couldn’t imagine working in AI or AR or in nanotech, cyber or crypto.” In current discourse, we hear regularly about the “purchasing power” of young people, but less about the influence they’ll have over industry, how new career roles will form around them, and how this unique enmeshment of technological development and societal happenstance will also inform the kinds of stories they relate to, and that we’ll hear too. As Lawrence puts it, “there’s an excellent ancient Arab proverb – ‘people resemble their times, more than they resemble their parents’”.

Lawrence’s more holistic approach to insights comes from his background in education. Over a decade ago, he was leading a large change in approach as Dean of a well-established design school in London. Needing his teams to think forward and imagine a cohort of students starting their studies “a decade or more into the future”, he began imagining new near-future scenarios and different educational settings. Meet Generation Alpha brings these research insights from the university context, into business.

On a personal level, Lawrence is also always thinking about generational differences. “While the world’s media was constantly talking about millennials and their love for flat-whites and crushed avocados I was already exploring the likely traits of Gen Z. By the time the media was looking at Zoomers, I was onto Alphas.” Lawrence’s own kids also span all the recent generations, with a household including “a millennial, two Zoomers and an Alpha”. Meet Generation Alpha became an extension of watching firsthand how they have grown up, their differing attitudes to work, leisure, culture, politics – as well as homework and chores.

While statistics on young adults don’t always convey the whole story, they’ve led to surprising findings about this generation. “The fact that 47 per cent of Alphas want to build gaming worlds is a little scary, think Apple Vision Pro and where Alphas may want to spend large proportions of their time in the future.”

These worries don’t stop with extreme digital fluency, either. “I’m concerned that 38 per cent of Alphas are concerned about the cost-of-living crisis and the impact it will be having on their lives. I’m concerned that 17 per cent have a probable mental illness but heartened by the fact that 27 per cent of Alphas have stepped in to confront a bully, in real life or online.”

These deeper, more human insights regarding this generation’s worries and hopes will no doubt be essential when understanding this generation, but also in predicting the future. The shape of industries far beyond marketing, into education, creative practices and technology. To get to the heart of these kinds of patterns, Lawrence looks to statistics, but also to wider culture. “I always like to start by comparing generational traits... Another good starting point is to look historically – what was going on in the world at critical points in your subject’s life? What was happening politically, what was happening culturally – in design, in media, on TV, in music, the movies? All are rich signifiers of how generations grew up differently.”

By now, it’s a long-running tradition for advertising and branding to progate generational tropes (Gen Z is the laid-back intern, Millennials are their workaholic manager, etc.). I am in no way immune to these categorisations – it’s easy and quick to draw links between brands and the generational groups they may target, or inadvertently reflect. However, as researchers amp up the volume of insights gathered about communities, or in this case, entire generations, interrogating what we know to be true about audiences will be crucial. Particularly for any organisation looking to stay, as the think pieces call it, “future proof”.

Lawrence also points out that getting to know generation Alpha will also be key to our own futures. “It was the anthropologist Dr Jane Goodall who once said ‘young people, when informed and empowered, when they realise what they do makes a difference, can indeed change the world.’ Let’s stop seeing Alphas as a new consumer audience and start to see them as a new hope for humanity. We’re in bleak times; we need to believe in and plan for a better future.”

For any readers looking to get in-depth with their understanding about the upcoming generation, Lawrence has shared some texts offering deeper insight:

Generations by Professor Jean M Twenge (2023)

Generations: How and why we change by Bobby Duffy (2021)

Gen Z Explained The Art of Living in a Digital Age by Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw and Linda Woodhead (2021)

iGen by Professor Jean M Twenge (2018)

Generation Alpha by Mark McCrindle (2021)