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This year marks the start of a new generation, and marketers are already taking notice

Jiana Smith Feb 3, 2025
Researchers say they can know a lot about the next generation based on the attitudes of their parents. Guillem de Balanzo/Getty Images

This year marks the start of a new generation, and marketers are already taking notice

Jiana Smith Feb 3, 2025
Researchers say they can know a lot about the next generation based on the attitudes of their parents. Guillem de Balanzo/Getty Images

Step aside, Generation Alpha.

With the new year comes a brand-new age cohort – Generation Beta, the group of children that will take their first breaths from 2025 to 2039. And marketers are already planning accordingly.

Labeled first by Australian marketing firm McCrindle Research, this generation is expected to come of age in a world where artificial intelligence and virtual environments are fully integrated into everyday life and institutions like schools and hospitals, while also valuing data privacy and sustainability.

“For Generation Beta, the digital and physical worlds will be seamless,” said a report on the cohort from McCrindle Research. 

Gen Alpha, whose final members were born in 2024, makes up 23% of the global population. By 2029, their economic power is expected to be greater than $5.46 trillion, according to McCrindle Research. Beta is expected to make up around 16% of the population by 2035 and also make a large mark on the global economy. And in the meantime, there’s the matter of their parents’ spending power to consider.

“Given that Generation Beta is only a few weeks old, I don’t think they have any buying power,” said Jason Dorsey, a market researcher at the Center for Generational Kinetics. “But knowing that there’s this new generation, then you can better engage their parents.”

So far, much of what researchers know about Generation Beta is thanks to what they know about the people that will raise them – younger millennials and older Generation Z-ers.

For example, Mark McCrindle of McCrindle Research – which also labelled Generation Alpha five years before their first births in 2010 – said that since Gen Z reported being more tech-skeptical than millennials and Gen X, they will likely be more careful in terms of monitoring screen time for their children, impacting the way Beta interacts with technology.

“They are aware of its potential and its benefits, but they’re also aware of the impairment it can offer,” said McCrindle. “From that fact alone, we know they’ll bring a different parenting style.”  

The exact age that children start becoming consumers is still debated among researchers. But Dorsey said that “certainly within the next 10 years, Gen Beta will start to influence consumer trends as it relates to kids. And then at that point, that influence only grows every year as they continue to get older.”

While it is impossible to know Generation Beta’s personal values right now, social researchers say they can get a pretty good idea of the world they’ll live in based on the projected pace of technology and the attitudes of previous generations. 

“Talking about the type of world they’re likely to experience over the next five to 10 years gives a lot of insight and validity to those trying to understand what would make this generation potentially different,” said Dorsey. 

Generational research has faced intense scrutiny in the past. It has been criticized for being overbroad, flattening the differences of people born over large spans of time (for example, a Baby Boomer born in 1950 v. 1963) and ignoring factors such as culture and class. 

Perhaps you’ve heard the pop culture stereotypes that have emerged – Gen X-ers are apathetic and don’t want to work; Millennials spend too much money on discretionary items to save up for a home; Gen Z-ers are more oriented towards social justice than prior cohorts. 

Such broad strokes can spell disaster for marketing teams who fail to consider nuance. Hoping to appeal to millennial and Gen Z’s penchant for social justice in 2017, PepsiCo released its ill-fated commercial that featured model Kendall Jenner crossing protest lines to give a police officer a Pepsi. The advertisement met with significant backlash and was pulled after one day.

Dorsey said that while some people rely too heavily on generational stereotypes, it is best to use them in conjunction with other factors as a starting point. 

“The way we look at generations is that they are clues, and that’s it,” said Dorsey

Prior to the labeling of generations Alpha and Beta, age cohorts, which grew popular as a concept with the grouping of the World War I-era “Greatest Generation,” were often named and defined in adolescence or young adulthood. 

McCrindle said that the Greek alphabet was chosen to aid in the process of generational analysis.

In this way, the generations after Beta and their birth years have already been determined: Gamma from 2040 to 2054, Delta from 2055 to 2069, and so on, following the Greek alphabet and a 15-year time span. 

The simplified naming system – in addition to emphasizing that Alpha and Beta stand alone as the first generations to be fully born in the 21st century – allows generations to define themselves as they come of age, said McCrindle. This is opposed to sweeping descriptors like “Generation AI.” 

“It allows the generation to make their own name,” said McCrindle. “We’re not naming them; we’re giving them a label. They’re making their own meaning over time.”

It will be years before a more organic name emerges for either generation but in the meantime, the idea of generations could be in trouble. As technology starts to progress faster and faster, the years that define a generation could become shorter, collapsing the model.

“If the rate of technology increases so dramatically and AI increases everything so dramatically, in 20 years, do we still refer to birth cohorts as generations? Or is the rate of change just so much faster that a generational conversation isn’t helpful?” said Dorsey.

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