Gen Next? Marketers Look Beyond X, Y, Z and even Alpha
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Gen Z is about to get some serious competition for all the research and marketing attention that the retail industry has lavished on it for the past ten years.
The oldest Gen Z-ers were just becoming adults (18-21) when they started making consumer research headlines in the mid-2010s. There are no official rules about what constitutes a generation, but social scientists tend to group them around major trends or events, like wars and recessions.
In addition to being the first “digital natives,” experiencing the Great Recession, and living through the COVID-19 pandemic, an early survey by First Insight identified Gen Z as the “sustainability generation,” predicting that it would influence all the others. Almost a decade later, Gen Z-ers are 13 to 28 years old and have been the future long enough that sustainability has become a mainstream social value.
Now, marketers are looking over their shoulders at Gen Z’s younger siblings, dubbed Gen Alpha—a new wave of teenagers, raised in a world dominated by screens (earning the nickname “Generation Glass”), and about to step into the consumer limelight.
Australian demographer Mark McCrindle, credited with popularizing the Alpha tag almost two decades ago, defined it as those born between 2010 and 2024. Now at about 2 billion souls worldwide, Alpha is the largest generation in global history (about 25% of the world’s population and 13% of the U.S.), and marketers are already trying to decipher what they think and care about.
At this early stage it’s hard to come to any useful conclusions, but according to digital agency Razorfish, “Because of their mastery of technology … they tend to be faster and more decisive than Millennials or Gen Z regarding products or services.”
According to McCrindle, Gen Alpha will be “the most materially endowed generation ever,” with “brand influence and purchasing power beyond their years.” Estimates of the amount of inherited wealth that will cascade down the generations over the next quarter-century range as high as $124 trillion—the largest wealth transfer in history.
Gen Alphas won’t start becoming adults for another couple of years, but that hasn’t stopped social scientists from thinking about the next generation which begins with babies born this year and on through 2039. We would like to call them “Gen OMEGA” as they will be the LAST GENERATION in history to NOT have Artificial Intelligence as a mainstream factor in their lives.
According to Pew Research, these are the dates that best define each of the generations:
The Silent Generation: 1928-1945
Baby Boomers: 1946-1964
Gen X: 1965-1980
Millennials: 1981-1996
Gen Z: 1997-2012
Gen Alpha: 2010-2025
“Gen OMEGA”: 2025-2039