How brands are navigating Gen Alpha marketing

At the start of this year, a video of 8 year-old twins Haven and Koti Garza went viral for proclaiming their status as Gen Alpha influencers.

The video, posted from the Garza Crew account run by the twins’ mom, seemed designed to poke fun at critiques of young influencers. “Of course we don’t have toys,” Haven says at the end of the video, before pushing a slime kit that she’s been playing with offscreen.

The twins may still play with toys, but the Garza Crew account also regularly posts the type of videos it poked fun at, including “get ready with me” videos in which the sisters slather on moisturizer and present “fit checks” for school. At the same time, backlash to content from younger influencers like the Garzas has grown, with some expressing fear that kids are, through social media, being pushed to grow up too fast.

The first wave of Gen Alpha, classified roughly as those born between 2010 and 2024, are now entering their teen years, and have never lived in a world without social media or influencers. As some become influencers themselves, brands are navigating the moral gray area of the space, both when it comes to reaching young people and potentially even encouraging some of them to become marketing mouthpieces themselves. All of this is happening as activists, experts, and some legislators push for more rights and protections for child influencers and determine whether children should be allowed on social media at all.

“It’s this two-part question for brands,” Elise Alverson, group strategy director at Ogilvy, told us. “First, is now the right time [to engage Gen Alpha], yes or no? If it is, then what are the strategic and creative guardrails that are going to help us do that in a way that is not harming them?”

Smells like tween spirit

Kids wanting to be grown-ups is not a new phenomenon. But the “tween” market, which once consisted of brands like Delia*s and publications like American Girl Magazine and Teen People, have largely gone by the wayside. Instead of looking to tween brands for inspiration, younger girls may be spending more time looking to grown-ups on social media, said Lauren Neff, a strategist at Ogilvy—which could be why some of them are adopting skin-care routines featuring high-end brands like Drunk Elephant.

“They’re looking up to influencers instead of getting the Delia*s catalog and circling what they want,” Neff told us.

Because of that, Neff said, many Gen Alphas are drawn to adult brands, adding that “even if [brands] are not intentionally marketing to kids, they’re still gravitating towards them because they’re seeing influencers and people on their feeds that are wearing that.”

That can put those brands in a sticky situation. In response to a surge of interest in its products among Gen Alpha, Drunk Elephant released details on which of its products are safe for kids to use. Other brands are lasering in on the trend as a marketing message: Dove released a spring ad campaign that asked, “Is it even possible to look 10 years younger at 10?”

On the flip side, some brands seem eager to work directly with Gen Alpha creators. Thirteen-year-old influencer Evelyn Unruh, who goes by Evelyn GRWM, has in the last year worked with makeup and skin-care brands like Anastasia Beverly Hills and Cocokind. Ayla Palmer, another prominent Gen Alpha influencer who completed the first grade in June, has worked with brands like Cult Gaia and Claire’s. And the Garzas have worked with brands ranging from Shein to Casetify.

“How do you do, fellow kids?”

The payoff can be big if brands embrace the youngest generation, which skin-care brand Evereden learned firsthand. Carolyn Curry, Evereden’s marketing director, told us that its kid-friendly collection, which was released in 2021, has “really blown up in the last year or so” as more parents seek safe products for their kids’ newfound skin-care regimens. Right now, she said, kids products are “significantly driving [Evereden’s] total brand growth,” with triple-digit YoY growth in the category.

Within the last year, she said the brand has shifted from targeting Gen Alpha parents to aiming to reach kids more directly through organic content on YouTube and TikTok. On TikTok alone, she said the brand has gained 100,000 followers this year, a 950% YoY increase.

“We want to talk specifically to Gen Alpha, to teens and tweens, because we feel like a lot of brands aren’t speaking directly to them,” Curry said.

The brand has partnered with creators including the Garzas, and it has recently upped its gifting efforts to Gen Alpha creators, Curry said, lowering its typical follower threshold and sending “a few hundred” packages to younger customers each month. The brand also maintains a program where Gen Alpha ambassadors get free monthly gifts, invites to in-person and virtual events, affiliate commission codes, and early access to product testing.

The brand’s paid ads remain geared toward parents, both to avoid directly advertising to kids and because, at the end of the day, parents are the ones paying, she said.

Caner Daywood, global director of content strategy at creator agency Buttermilk, said he feels it’s important for brands to conduct more due diligence when working with Gen Alpha creators compared to older talent.

“Very young people [are] very impressionable,” he said. “As they’re becoming more of a commercial entity for us to explore working with, what does that look like? Who is their manager? Is it their parents?”

At Evereden, Curry said the brand goes through creator content with “more of a fine-tooth comb” before posting to check that it’s age-appropriate. It also only works with parent-managed or parent-run accounts or Gen Alpha creators with a talent agency.

Claire’s, which has been running a year-long collab campaign with Gen Z and Gen Alpha influencers since the spring, also looks for parent-managed accounts, Meghan Hurley, VP of global marketing, told us. The brand also uses SMS to reach parents with deals that they—or their kids—can take advantage of when shopping.

“[Gen Alphas] share a ton on how to get the best deals and things that are limited or exclusive at the stores,” Hurley said.

While she noted that Gen Alphas are digital natives, Hurley said demand for in-person experiences isn’t aging out—and demand for e-commerce among Gen Alpha isn’t as high as older generations.

“They really value in-person and the discovery of our stores,” she said, adding that Claire’s has gone so far as to create a special section in stores for its youngest customers, complete with smaller versions of products sold elsewhere in the store.

Evereden and Sol de Janeiro have also reported success in reaching Gen Alpha through in-person events, and earlier this year, Hollister reported seeing an uptick in in-store foot traffic, similar to Claire’s.

Even with some signs pointing to a mall renaissance for teens and tweens, Hurley acknowledged that there’s still a lack of third spaces for today’s tweens. “Hopefully we’re filling that gap,” she said.

In the meantime, the kids are still very much online, which means we’re likely only going to see more Gen Alpha influencers emerge.

“Kids are on social media whether you like it or not…and they’re being fed the same algorithms as adults,” Curry said. “Just like when I was a kid, and I got my cues from Seventeen magazine and music videos and movies, kids these days are getting their cues from social media in a more direct way.”