The Rise of Gen Alpha: Trends, Traits, and How Brands Can Connect

They grow up so fast!

Diving into the beliefs and consumption behaviours of Generation Alpha as its oldest members come of age

- Sucheta Chakraborty for Drip by Kulfi Collective.

In 2014, four-year-old Kochi-based Nihal Raj wanted to make toy unboxing videos on YouTube, a lot like the ones he liked watching on the popular EvanTubeHD channel. Amused by the proposition, his father brought back toys from one of his trips to China for little Nihal to unbox. But the exercise failed. The little boy was so drawn to the toys that he ended up playing with them instead of reviewing them for the video. Shortly after this, Nihal asked his father to record him making ice popsicles. This time, he fared better. The video was taken at a stretch without needing cuts and when Nihal’s father posted it later on Facebook, it was an instant hit with his friends and family. Its acceptance inspired them to start KichaTubeHD, where Nihal, popularly known as ‘Little Chef Kicha’, began showcasing his culinary skills to a steadily growing subscriber base.

“Back when I started, it was still during a time when the YouTube boom was happening, and there weren't that many kids cooking. So, the concept alone was new,” reflects Nihal, a winner of the 2020 Global Child Prodigy Award who has also exhibited his cooking skills on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. But it is passion, and not the desire for fame, he believes, that has fuelled his success. “If you're going to make videos, it should not be for the purpose of becoming popular, but rather because you're actually interested in [the subject]. It is very clear when you're speaking to the camera whether you're doing this for the sake of doing it or because you actually love it.” That Nihal, now 14 and over 5’ 6”, doesn’t see himself as ‘little’ anymore, has hence taken a hiatus from making videos and is considering a change in his brand image is further proof of a sincerity not to mention astuteness of purpose.???

Nihal is an older member of ‘Generation Alpha’, a term coined by Australian social researcher and demographer Mark McCrindle for those born between 2010—the year the iPad was launched—and 2025, and predicted to be the largest, wealthiest and most formally educated generation ever. As the only generation born entirely in the 21st century, they are also the most digitally literate, forging an immediate and intimate relationship with the screen—using it for comfort, entertainment, education and inspiration alike, a fact that has also given them the moniker of ‘Generation Glass’. And YouTube, as Nihal’s own journey reflects, with its free-on-demand content and equally informative and addictive recommendation algorithm, is where this generation feels most at home.?

Software engineer Vinoth Chandar recognised the platform’s potential and its possible hold on children early on. In 2013, he founded ChuChu TV, the first kids’ YouTube channel in India to hit 50 million subscribers. Named after his daughter, with whom he would regularly watch YouTube videos, ChuChu TV’s success is attributed to a variety of reasons, namely, its peppy music, an engaging bunch of characters, the first of which was modelled on Chandar’s daughter, a focus on values of sharing, cooperation and resilience, and its positive and inclusive spin on lyrics and age-old nursery rhymes.

“When we first did the ‘Chubby Cheeks’ nursery rhyme,” Chandar tells us, “we did the usual version, and then immediately wanted to change it because it had the line ‘Curly hair very fair’ which we didn't like. We rewrote it to say ‘curly hair flows in air’, so that it could include all kids.” The content is available now on platforms like Amazon Prime, Kidoodle.TV, and on the ChuChu TV Pro App, but YouTube is still where Chandar gets the most traction because, as he insists, “there is no platform as big as YouTube and no competitor to YouTube. Services like Netflix and Amazon Prime are walled OTTs, and so, not for user generated content,” Chandar notes, sharing examples of parents who get their kids to sing ChuChu TV nursery rhymes and upload the videos on YouTube. “There are a lot of advantages to YouTube. It is the number one app in the world being consumed today.”

Gen Alphas are noticeably influenced by their Millennial parents. From values around sustainability, diversity, inclusivity and climate advocacy, to an acute awareness of products, their origin and ingredient lists and even an early exposure to exotic travel destinations, Gen Alphas are imbibing Millennial tastes and interests and are also effectively emotionally closer to their parents as a result of their shared values. In fact, MetaShot, a company launched in June 2023, offering a console-like cricket experience and with a nearly 65 per cent Gen Alpha consumer base, first targeted not Gen Alphas but their Millennial fathers. The idea was to tap into the Millennial nostalgia for the real-life sport they grew up playing, hoping their more tech-inclined Gen Alpha kids—who may not have played any sport growing up—would be drawn into it in the process. “It becomes an emotional purchase because the father is reliving his childhood by playing cricket and also introducing his kid to this sport which he loved so much. Because the bat is priced at ?5,500, it's not something that the kid can just ask for. It has to have a strong sense of approval from the dad,” Prince Thomas, CEO and co-founder of MetaShot, shares. Citing the success of Pokémon GO among children, Thomas calls Generation Alpha a visual action generation rather than merely a visual generation. “We could be the bridge between digital and physical,” he says, where children with no experience of the game could hone their skills and gain confidence before engaging physically with the real-life sport.

Millennial insistence on emotional fluency is also at the heart of edutainment startup EMoMee, co-founded by Pooja Jauhari, Varun Duggirala and Suraksha Subhramaniam, with the credo of being built by parents for parents, armed with the science of educators and focused on expanding the EQ of children aged between 2 and 7. “We realised that kids struggle with a lot of things (social skills, nervousness, anxiety, confidence, etc.) in the early years and if they have the right vocabulary to talk about their emotions, if they have the right tools to deal with them and build some of these aspects, the change you see is drastic,” Duggirala tells us. A father to a 7-year-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old, Duggirala speaks of the kind of home environment and conscientious, frank and careful parenting that has led people to believe that this generation will grow into kinder adults. He shares that his kids are encouraged to talk about their feelings, the parents do not argue behind closed doors but in front of children to show them that resolution is possible and that his daughter occasionally paints to express her feelings. At three, she decided to become a vegetarian and had once asked her mother whether the animals in Old MacDonald’s farm were truly happy.

Millennial love for travel is also reflected in their Gen Alpha kids, who, given their significant ability to influence parent purchases, are also unsurprisingly able to influence family vacation planning and destination choices. Mansi Zaveri, founder of parenting and childcare platform Kidsstoppress and mother to 15 and 12-year-old girls, tells us of how her daughters’ pop culture interests determine the family’s travel plans. “I can never do Korea without my daughter, because of how influenced she is by the whole K-pop wave,” she shares. “We are also bundling experiences with holidays now. For instance, we went to Singapore for a Taylor Swift concert. [I am speaking only of a certain economic stratum] but I know that every single parent who has a Swiftie in their home has done Europe because she was touring Europe this summer.”?

Online gaming culture is central to Gen Alpha’s needs and interests but what is also interesting is the opportunity for socialization that it offers—a feature in keeping with this generation’s penchant for communication through screens and even personas. Roby John, CEO and founder at SuperGaming, and father to two Gen Alphas, remembers a time when his 12-year-old daughter switched schools but was not sad to leave her friends behind because they were all in her Roblox. “That’s the significant shift that has happened where the physical side of being connected like going to the same school matters, but Roblox is kind of the place where they feel more socially connected. They have their networks through these games,” says John.?

But with increased and varied exposure to technology, the need to ensure children’s safety in the digital environment has become of paramount importance with issues like ethical design and data usage and protection taking centerstage. Because of SuperGaming’s experience with Pac-man worldwide where different safety frameworks (GDPR, COPPA) were incorporated, all of their games automatically have that background, says John. No personal information is used, tracked or shared in their games. All the text chat providers come with in-built safety monitoring, and so what one can say in a text is moderated. There are also real moderators who things can be reported to, and then action is taken to block accounts. AI tools also help as content is easier to parse through and moderate. Moreover, while they don't enforce screen time explicitly, after one and a half hour of gameplay, they don't reward the player inside the game anymore. “We are non-incentivizing use. I think that's a game developer's responsibility to think about how you play healthy sessioning time, turn away all the rewards and remove all the dopamine hits after a while,” shares John. ? ?

On the other side of the spectrum, parents of Gen Alpha kids tell us of the various tactics—both desperate and deliberate—that they have implemented to protect their children from online abuse and threats to privacy. “I used to wake up at 4 in the morning and delete all the bullying messages that appeared in the Comments section before Kicha woke up. I noticed that most of these messages appeared late at night and realised they could be from his fellow students who would be allowed computer time only in the evenings. There were so many things there that a father just couldn't read about his own son,” says Nihal’s father, Rajagopal V Krishnan, a brand image consultant.?

While Mansi Zaveri is pro online, where tech is “a great medium to leverage”, ensuring that her kids are “part of a global playing field,” she is clear on the boundaries that it must come with. She has never posted her children’s pictures online. Her daughter’s Instagram account is private and under family supervision. She has ensured that her daughters understand the importance of screen time and digital footprint management for both personal and financial safety. “I don't even need to ask her now for her WhatsApp location when she's stepping out because I've explained to her the difference between spying and supervision. I don't want to spy on her. I'm just concerned about her safety. It comes from constantly having conversations with them about why we are asking them to exercise caution. And I think that has played a pivotal role,” she shares.?

Zaveri also talks about the delays in social, emotional and physical development noticeable in young Gen Alphas as a result of increased screen reliance that was only intensified by the isolation of the pandemic. From cases of myopia, ADHD and delayed speech, to children struggling to read and write and delays in the development of gross and fine motor skills, as well as a social incompetence with regard to sharing, communication, negotiation and dealing with rejection, the drawbacks to phones being used as “babysitters” are many. “I know children who can't tie their own shoe laces because they lack hand-eye coordination,” Zaveri tells us. “When watching videos, for children aged 0 to 3, the pace of animation can cause neurological impairment because the child's brain cannot process so many different colours, characters and sounds going by so quickly. They need to be made in a format that is suitable to that age group. Parents today are not paying heed to such things.”

When marketing to Gen Alpha, brands need to be cognisant of a variety of things. Given that they are a highly informed and socially and politically aware generation, brands need to be sincere and authentic about the stories they tell and the messages they put out. Brands need to craft marketing messages that emphasize emotional intelligence, resilience, and teamwork, using stories or characters that Gen Alpha can emulate. They need to appeal to Gen Alpha’s intelligence while being conscious of this generation’s power to discern, and align with their values around inclusivity, tolerance, acceptance, the support of local growers and manufacturers and environmental conservation. Short-form video content on platforms like YouTube—which also gives the community the ability to co-create—will be a key way to reach this demographic. As many Gen Alphas are content creators and influencers themselves, collaboration will be more effective than traditional one-way communication. Generation Alpha doesn’t place a huge premium on distinctions between the physical and the digital worlds and hence brands will have to offer them integrated experiences. Interactive, immersive content with gamification avenues will be essential. This generation also enjoys the idea of a digital hang-out where they can connect socially with their peers, and brands can be present in platforms, like Roblox, that lets them hang out together online to engage with them.

Gen Alpha’s high purchasing ability coupled with their influencing power mean that premium brands (beauty and skincare brands, for instance) that have traditionally targeted older customers should start taking this demographic seriously. Largely because of the influence of their Millennial parents, Gen Alpha prioritises design, quality and artistry, which indicates that brands need to invest in streamlined and clean design aesthetics for their products. There is also great scope to leverage nostalgia for the experiences, brands and pop cultural elements Millennials grew up with. Since these parents are keen to introduce their children to those cherished experiences, brands can dip into Millennial preferences to indirectly market to Gen Alpha. Finally, cautious and informed Millennial parenting demands that brands assure children’s safety online, both with regard to ethical data usage and digital behaviour, and also by being mindful of the design and formats in which they publish their content.????????????