Marketing to Gen Alpha: How Future Consumers Will Change Branding

Industry & Competitive Context

Generation Alpha the cohort born roughly between 2010 and the mid-2020s is the first generation to have no lived memory of a world without smartphones, tablets, and algorithmic social media. The term was coined by Mark McCrindle of the Australian research firm McCrindle Research, which ran a 2008 survey to decide what the generation following Gen Z should be called. McCrindle Research defines the cohort’s birth years as 2010–2024, though other researchers use varying ranges (for example, Jean Twenge uses 2013–2029 and the Annie E. Casey Foundation uses 2013–2025); there is no single academic consensus on the exact boundary years. By 2024, Generation Alpha had surpassed 2 billion people worldwide, making it one of the largest generational cohorts in human history, and McCrindle Research has projected that by 2030 this generation will represent approximately 11% of the global workforce.

This generation sits at the center of a structurally different media and commerce environment than any before it. Three publicly documented shifts define the competitive landscape brands now operate in. First, screen exposure begins extremely early: research cited in generational studies indicates that approximately 90% of young children use a handheld device by age one. Second, entertainment consumption has shifted away from linear and even traditional streaming toward interactive and user-generated platforms; Disney Channel lost approximately one-third of its viewership in 2020, while shows such as Cocomelon, Peppa Pig, and Bluey rank among the most-watched children’s content globally, and in 2019 nearly 60% of Netflix’s then 152 million global subscribers watched children’s or family content at least monthly. Third, regulatory scrutiny of marketing to children has intensified materially, most notably through the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s finalized amendments to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule, announced on January 16, 2025 by a unanimous 5–0 Commission vote.

Within this environment, two publicly traded companies with extensive, verifiable disclosure Roblox Corporation and The LEGO Group illustrate two distinct but complementary strategic responses to Generation Alpha: one rooted in platform-based interactive engagement, and the other in physical product innovation paired with licensed digital extensions. This case study restricts itself to what these organizations, and the relevant regulator, have themselves disclosed through annual reports, shareholder letters, SEC filings, and official press releases.

Brand Situation Prior to Strategic Shift

Both companies entered the Gen Alpha era from different starting points. Roblox, an interactive entertainment platform founded in 2004 and taken public via direct listing in 2021, built its business model around user-generated “experiences” rather than developer-published games, positioning itself from inception as a platform for younger users to create and play simultaneously. The LEGO Group, a century-old Danish toy manufacturer, entered this period as an established physical-product company navigating a toy industry in which, as the company itself reported, overall market growth for 2025 was 7%, a baseline against which LEGO’s own performance is explicitly benchmarked in its public disclosures.

Strategic Objective

Roblox has explicitly stated, in its own public shareholder communications, that it aims to be “the largest dedicated gaming platform for users aged 13 and under (U13)” a direct, company-disclosed objective that frames Generation Alpha (specifically its under-13 segment) as a core strategic audience rather than an incidental one. The company has simultaneously disclosed a secondary objective of growing engagement among users aged 18–34, a cohort it states it reaches on fewer than 10% of U.S. adults in that age range daily, suggesting its core identity remains anchored to younger users.

The LEGO Group’s publicly stated objective, as described in its FY2025 results announcement, centers on ensuring “more children than ever” receive LEGO products, combined with explicit growth targets that outpace the broader toy market. The company reported consumer sales growth of 16% in 2025 against toy market growth of 7%, and stated that its market share grew more than twice as fast as the overall toy market — company-disclosed figures that frame market share capture among young consumers as a core strategic goal.

Campaign Architecture & Execution (Platform and Product Strategy)

Roblox’s execution, as disclosed in its Q4 2025 shareholder letter, centers on three pillars: safety-gated engagement infrastructure, monetization tools, and a maturing advertising business. The platform reported 144 million daily active users (DAUs) in Q4 2025, up 69% year-over-year, with the company adding approximately 60 million DAUs over the course of the year. Of the 45% of DAUs who had completed age verification checks as of January 31, 2026, the company disclosed that 35% were under 13, 38% were between 13 and 17, and 27% were over 18 the company’s own caveat being that these age-checked figures are estimates and may not represent the full platform population. Roblox disclosed that it began mandatory age checks for chat functionality in Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands (reaching roughly 60% of DAUs in those markets) ahead of a global rollout starting in early January 2026, and that it plans to introduce “continuous age estimation” using behavioral signals such as play patterns, social graphs, and economic activity.

On monetization, Roblox disclosed 36.7 million monthly paying users in Q4 2025, nearly double the prior year, and stated that nearly $7 billion of its 2025 bookings came from its user base “without significant reliance on advertising.” The company characterized its advertising revenue as still “modest,” while disclosing that its Rewarded Video ad format is available to more than 1,000 brands, with completion rates above 90% and viewability of 95%, and that an overhauled Ads Manager cut cost-per-play by more than 40% compared to Q1 2025. A new “Homepage Feature” ad format launched in January 2026. The letter did not name specific brand advertisers.

The LEGO Group’s execution, as disclosed in its March 2026 FY2025 results release, centers on physical product breadth combined with licensed digital crossovers. The company launched its largest-ever annual portfolio over 860 products, approximately half of them new spanning themes including LEGO City, Technic, Star Wars, Icons, and Botanicals. Notably, the company disclosed digital-physical crossover execution through LEGO Minecraft and LEGO Super Mario product lines, and reported that LEGO Fortnite Odyssey, a licensed in-game experience, surpassed 1 billion cumulative player hours a figure the company disclosed as a measure of digital engagement success. On the experiential side, LEGO disclosed a Formula 1 partnership activated at more than twenty Grand Prix events in 2025, with an extension into F1 Academy for 2026, and the completed acquisition (February 2026) of 29 LEGO Discovery Centres and LEGOLAND Discovery Centres from Merlin Entertainments, which the company states attract approximately five million visitors annually.

Positioning & Consumer Insight

Roblox’s positioning is built around a disclosed insight regarding the U13 segment specifically that it represents a durable, differentiated audience worth building dedicated safety and product infrastructure around, rather than treating child users as an undifferentiated subset of a general platform. This is evidenced by the company’s investment in age-verification infrastructure as a product feature rather than purely a compliance cost, and by its explicit framing of “U13” as a named strategic segment in its own communications.

LEGO’s positioning, as disclosed through its product strategy, reflects an insight that Generation Alpha consumers (and the parents purchasing for them) respond to franchise crossover between physical construction play and the digital entertainment properties this generation already consumes evidenced concretely by the LEGO Minecraft, LEGO Super Mario, and LEGO Fortnite Odyssey lines, each pairing a legacy physical toy format with an IP native to interactive gaming culture.

Separately, broader generational research referenced in secondary academic and media compilations (e.g., Wikipedia’s sourced entry on Generation Alpha, citing named studies) documents several consumer-behavior data points relevant to brand positioning for this cohort: a 2019 study by Linda McCartney Foods found that nearly 50% of surveyed members of the generation were reducing meat consumption; a 2021 FONA survey reported a stated preference among the generation for food flavors from India, Peru, Vietnam, and Morocco; and a 2021 JDO report found that less structured mealtimes among the generation correlated with increased snacking and preference for nutrient-dense, sustainably positioned snacks. These are presented here only as documented survey findings from named third-party research firms, not as verified industry-wide consumer behavior absent methodological detail, which is not available in the secondary source reviewed.

Media & Channel Strategy

Verified public disclosure on channel strategy is strongest for Roblox, given its SEC reporting obligations as a public company. Roblox’s shareholder letter indicates a channel mix increasingly weighted toward markets outside the U.S. and Canada, where DAUs grew 79% year-over-year compared to 32% growth in the U.S. and Canada, with the strongest hours growth recorded in the Asia-Pacific region. This suggests the company’s disclosed channel expansion is substantially international in orientation, not U.S.-centric.

For LEGO, the company disclosed that its LEGO Branded Retail stores and LEGO.com recorded record visitor numbers and the company’s highest-ever customer satisfaction scores in 2025, alongside continued work with third-party retail partners to expand product availability but the press release reviewed for this case study did not disclose specific e-commerce traffic figures, paid media spend, or a breakdown of channel contribution to sales.

Business & Brand Outcomes

Roblox, full-year 2025 (as disclosed in its Q4 2025 shareholder letter):

Revenue reached $4.9 billion, up 36% year-over-year. Bookings reached $6.8 billion, up 55% year-over-year. Full-year free cash flow was approximately $1.35 billion. For Q4 2025 specifically, revenue was $1.4 billion (up 43%) and bookings were $2.2 billion (up 63%), with free cash flow of $307 million for the quarter. The company’s 2026 guidance, as disclosed, projects revenue growth of 23%–29% and bookings growth of 22%–26%.

The LEGO Group, full-year 2025 (as disclosed in its FY2025 results announcement):

Revenue rose 12% to DKK 83.5 billion. Operating profit rose 18% to DKK 22.0 billion. Net profit rose 21% to DKK 16.7 billion. Operating cash flow rose 4% to DKK 19.9 billion, and free cash flow rose to DKK 10.8 billion from DKK 10.2 billion. The company reported renewable and recycled content in purchased brick materials rising to 52% in 2025 from 33% in 2024, alongside a 20% year-over-year increase in total sustainability investment, and stated that its social responsibility initiatives had a positive impact on more than 11.7 million children in 2025.

Strategic Implications

Three implications follow directly from the documented evidence above, without extrapolation beyond what each organization has disclosed.

First, regulatory architecture is becoming a disclosed and material input into product and platform design for companies serving Generation Alpha, not a background compliance function. Roblox’s own disclosure of mandatory age-verification rollouts, continuous age-estimation tooling, and geographically staged compliance rollout (Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, then global) demonstrates that age-assurance infrastructure is now a line item in strategic planning. The FTC’s finalized COPPA amendments — which require separate, verifiable parental consent before disclosing children’s data to third parties for purposes including targeted advertising, prohibit indefinite data retention, and require documented retention policies establish a compliance baseline that any company monetizing attention from users under 13 in the United States must now build around, as confirmed by the unanimous January 2025 Commission vote.

Second, the two companies examined demonstrate that monetization models diverge even where the target audience overlaps. Roblox’s disclosed reliance on user-generated bookings (nearly $7 billion in 2025) over advertising revenue, which it describes as still “modest,” suggests that direct-to-consumer virtual commerce currently outpaces advertising as the dominant monetization lever for platforms serving this age group a structurally different model from traditional child-directed media, which historically monetized primarily through advertising and licensing.

Third, LEGO’s disclosed strategy of pairing physical products with licensed digital-native intellectual property (Minecraft, Super Mario, Fortnite) indicates that for legacy physical-goods companies, credibility with Generation Alpha is being pursued through alignment with pre-existing digital culture rather than through building proprietary digital platforms from scratch a build-versus-partner distinction that itself constitutes a disclosed strategic choice, evidenced by the partnership structure of each named product line rather than wholly owned digital product development.

Taken together, the verified public record indicates that marketing to Generation Alpha, at least among the two companies examined here, is being executed less as discrete campaigns and more as sustained structural investment in platform safety infrastructure, in cross-media product architecture, and in compliance tooling with financial outcomes reported at the enterprise level rather than attributed to isolated generational marketing initiatives.