Retailers and brands looking to reach “Generation ZAlpha” cannot avoid digital and virtual worlds like Youtube, TikTok, Roblox or Minecraft. On the other hand, this “micro-generation” may also appreciate the mental peace that physical shops offer.
TikTok and YouTube
Children born between 2008 and 2013 experienced the impact of the pandemic at a crucial moment in their development: they were taught through screens, saw their friends only online and grew up in virtual worlds. This determines their world view and their current – and future – consumption behaviour, Maarten Leyts says. The CEO of marketing agency Trendwolves has just devoted a book to the “micro-generation” that lies at the border between the youngest of Generation Z (the ‘digital natives’), and the oldest of Generation Alpha (the children who grew up with tablets).
ZAlphas are the virtual natives, young people who during the pandemic embraced technology as a facilitator for their productivity and creativity. They grow up on Roblox and Minecraft, love Anime and K-Pop, follow ‘kidfluencers’ and ‘kidpreneurs’ on Youtube and TikTok. Globally, children aged 4 to 18 spent an average of 112 minutes a day on TikTok in 2023, 107 minutes more than a year earlier. YouTube still remains the biggest streaming app for this age group, according to research by software maker Qustodio among more than 400,000 families and schools worldwide.
Lunapark experience
“From the age of five, children start to influence purchasing behaviour”, Leyts states. “This generation shops all over the world, at Amazon or Disney+ and via social media. They do n’ot care where their stuff comes from. They interact with peers from all over the world, speaking English with great ease. That is amazing.”
Yet for this generation, not everything is becoming digital. Young people think the physical shopping experience is important again: “For Gen Z, virtual worlds had to look like the real world. For ZAlphas, it is the other way around: they grew up in virtual worlds and they are therefore more likely to expect the real world to look like the virtual world. We are moving towards a shopping experience where those worlds merge, with virtual mirrors and gamification. A store has to offer a kind of lunapark experience.”
For Gen ZAlpha, the physical shop becomes a place where you come to relax. “Stores can become places of mental peace, by creating an environment that brings calm and where people like to linger.”
K-pop hype
This generation’s sphere of interest is strongly influenced by Asian cultures. K-pop is an ongoing hype: “My 13-year-old daughter watches K-pop drama series on Netflix. For them, that is normal. Moreover, C-pop is emerging from China, as is T-pop from Thailand. That influences their clothing, eating and fandom enormously.” Plenty of gadgets linked to these hypes are popping up in shops.
This is a deliberate strategy: the Korean government is developing K-pop as an economic engine. “When fans are close to their idols, they eat what they eat, drink what they drink, dress the same… South Korea has even developed special visas for people who only come to Seoul to walk along K-Star Road.” Participants in the RetailHunt to Seoul last year experienced this for themselves.
Boundaries blur
What further guidance does the book offer retailers? “Understanding this generation’s media consumption seems essential to me: the importance of Youtube and TikTok, the popularity of social commerce and kidfluencers like Ryan’s World or Zooey in the City, virtual worlds like Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and Zepeto.”
Popular gaming platform Roblox, for example, breaks communication barriers with AI translation technology to translate 24 million chats daily. Its players can automatically translate chats into any language, including slang. For the retail sector, this represents a future where the boundaries of language and geography are blurring.
Therefore, the website is no longer the central point in the customer journey. Retailers have to sell where the customer is: TikTok and Instagram have integrated e-commerce features, for example. “TikTok is now even coming up with ‘out of phone’ branded advertising in the places where young people are, just to keep triggering them.”
Sustainability
Paradoxically, young people today are at the forefront of the fight for a better environment, but they are also fans of fast-fashion brands like Shein and Temu. “Fast fashion is cheap and influencers entice young people to buy new clothes all the time, even if they know it is bad for the earth. This creates an inner dichotomy: they want to help the environment, but also keep up with the latest fashion. A big stumbling block is that sustainable fashion is often too expensive for young people’s budgets. They do want to live more sustainably, but before anything it has to be affordable and cool.”
Conclusion? “This generation has a great entrepreneurial spirit and is concerned with values that you can work with as a brand. Show empathy, commitment, humour. Create personalisation opportunities, organise workshops in your shops, focus on the coming together of the offline and online worlds. Make the physical shop a pleasant and safe destination.”
“Generation ZAlpha. Connecting with the Next Micro-Generation” was published – in English – by LannooCampus. More information: https://www.lannoocampus.be/nl/generation-zalpha
