When you look up what Generation Alpha is on Wikipedia, you get the following definition:

Generation Alpha is the demographic cohort succeeding Generation Z. It is the first to be born entirely in the 21st century and the third millennium. Most members of Generation Alpha are the children of millennials.

Generation Alpha has been born at a time of falling fertility rates across much of the world and experienced the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as young children. For those with access, children's entertainment has been increasingly dominated by electronic technology, social networks, and streaming services, with interest in traditional television concurrently falling. Changes in the use of technology in classrooms and other aspects of life have had a significant effect on how this generation has experienced early learning compared to previous generations. Studies have suggested that health problems related to screen time, allergies, and obesity became increasingly prevalent in the late2010s.

To these problems could be added persistent symptoms of anxiety and panic attacks.

The Alpha generation tends to be the children of the Millennials.

Born from 2000 on wards, mostly from 2010 onwards, they are slowly entering the market.

However, most of them act as strong and powerful prescribers, and the financiers of their choices are their parents. They are an exceptionally informed generation and in most cases much more savvy on social media and online shopping than their parents. They are also much more impervious to traditional marketing techniques, based on promises of product benefits that often prove to be useless or ineffective.Never, as in this generation, has more trust been placed in the opinions of users than in the promises of manufacturers.

The question is: how do we reach and captivate this generation?

In conferences on these topics, they are rarely analyzed independently of the other generations, forgetting that there is a huge divide between this generation and those that preceded it. Financiers are often unaware or dismissive of the vehicles that work with this generation. They imagine Tik-Tok as futile and don't realize the enormous influence it has on prescribers, both building and destroying brands and products. And company decision-makers are completely unaware of how to use this tool.

The autonomy that theAlpha generation enjoys, the community that is generated on social networks and which is hermetic to other generations, ends up being inaccessible to the concerns and causes that have traction in this generation.

There is a great deal of ignorance about what they value and what they despise, and understanding their causes is fundamental to being able to correspond truthfully and authentically, embedding them in the personality of the brands. Any error or inconsistency or falsehood will be bitterly paid for, because it will be immediately unmasked by one of the defrauded Alpha.

It is said that people play all their lives, they just change their toys with age. In fact, that's the basis of the concept of gamification. But in this case, taking advantage of the app's capabilities in which this generation is highly knowledgeable and efficient requires learning from it. It's more common for an Alpha to teach an adult than for an adult to teach an Alpha in these matters. It's as if there were a border on either side of which we don't know how the other works. There's no need to hesitate in turning this generation into the teachers of marketing professionals, analyzing, and learning what they like, how they like it and how they react.

Like all generations before them, they want to be considered adults and must be treated as such. The biggest mistake companies and marketers can make is to assume what they like, prefer, where and how they should or can buy.

As the poet Fernando Pessoa said, there's nothing worse than shutting yourself away in the office of your own head. That's why we need to open the door for this generation to teach those that came before it... It has a lot to teach so that we can reach them.

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