Youth dialect evolves at lightning speed. Whether you’re seeing it on TikTok, hearing it from your own kids, or watching it pop up on TV, keeping up can feel like a full-time job. But when it comes to conducting market research with young people, researchers and insight teams need to know how to engage with them. It’s essential if you want to engage them and get honest, valuable insights.
Young people and market research
With a spending power of over $100 billion, Gen Alpha has become a vital audience for market research. Born after 2010, Gen Alpha is growing up in a fully digital world and is already influencing household purchasing decisions across a range of categories. It's essential that brands, researchers and children's recruitment agencies understand how to engage this generation and gather meaningful insights into their behaviours, attitudes and preferences.
Communicating with young people
Conducting market research with children and teenagers can be challenging. For starters, they have proven to be an elusive group: they live in a world of continuous updates and are easily distracted. They live and share their lives on the go, they want information instantly - and if they don’t get it they will move on just as fast. However, despite all of that, it’s essential that market researchers understand the lifestyle, habits and behaviours of young people. Here’s how:
The importance of digital
Gen Alpha has never known a world without smartphones, social media, streaming services and connected technology. Digital methodologies are therefore essential when conducting market research with children and young people. Market research online communities, mobile ethnography, video, social media research. If you want to attract the generation of tomorrow, you need to appeal to their digital nature. Digital methods can work particularly well with younger audiences, but the right approach will depend on the age group, topic and research objective.
Speak to them in their language
Thanks to social media and texting where messages tend to be written quickly and in short bursts, young people today communicate differently to older generations. Whether it’s emojis, conjoined words or abbreviations, young people can get their meaning across in fewer words. Linguistic creativity and cultural references are hallmarks of this language, where some phrases have even been born simply due to a popular meme or a mistake on social media that people found funny and co-opted. From rizz, "it's giving...", and main character energy, if you want to engage with this audience and get them to spill the tea (see what we did there?) you need to keep up.
Youth language evolves with every meme, so if you want to reach out to young people and conduct market research with them, you will need to make an effort to understand how they communicate and what they respond to, and ensure you keep up with the changes. Young people today tend to be sus(picious) of obvious “sales-y” tactics and prefer to be approached in a more casual way, which means that clever, entertaining messaging with a sense of humour can make a big impact and encourage them to share with their friends.
It’s not about shoehorning slang into your screeners, but about understanding the tone, pace, and style of how young people communicate. This helps moderators build rapport and ensures participants feel comfortable enough to share openly.
Let them know they are valued
It’s not just about talking to young people in their language, though. If brands and children's recruitment agencies want to engage with young people, they need to know how much their opinion is valued. Gen Alpha is growing up at a time when young people expect to be heard and have opportunities to shape the products, services and experiences around them. They like collaborating and want to benefit others. So if you want to encourage young people to take part in your market research, it’s important not just to communicate with them in their language, but to make sure you emphasise how important their role is, too. By showing them how the research will make a difference, you can make sure they’re keen to get involved and eager to take part.
Thinking about conducting market research with young people? Download our free Gen Alpha Research Cheat Sheet for practical tips on recruitment, consent, methods and incentives.
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