The brief writes a person. The household buys as a group.
Every brand brief starts the same way. Pick an age. Pick an income bracket. Pick a face to put against it. It’s tidy, it’s fundable, and it’s increasingly wrong.
Because the person actually adding something to a basket rarely decides alone. PwC’s 2026 survey of Gen Alpha found that 97% of 7 to 14 year olds say they decide what to buy independently at least some of the time, and these kids are already changing how their families spend money. That’s not a niche kids’ marketing insight. It’s proof that purchase influence in most households runs across at least two generations at once, often three. A single-persona campaign is casting against half the room.
The clearest recent proof isn’t even in beauty
A confectionery brand just made this argument better than most beauty brands ever have. Candy Kittens, the sweet brand founded by Jamie Laing, recently paired him with tennis coach Judy Murray for a joint Instagram collaboration, booked through MN2S. On paper it’s an odd pairing: reality TV meets Fed Cup captaincy. That’s exactly why it worked. Murray sits at one end of the generational spectrum, Laing at the other, and the humour comes from the gap between them rather than any forced common ground.
What makes it more than a celebrity mash-up is the family layer underneath. The reel also features Jamie’s own mum, with the joke landing on the contrast between her and Murray’s very different parenting energy. That’s cross-generational casting doing double duty: two public figures from different worlds, plus a genuine mother in the actual footage. It’s a reminder that this format isn’t locked to skincare or wellness. Any category with a household decision behind the purchase can borrow it.
Two ways to use family, and they’re not the same tool
Not every cross-generational play needs a parent physically in the shot. A recent skincare campaign built by Norse Organics took a different route. Actress Jennie Garth isn’t on camera with her daughters at all. Instead, she talks directly to other parents, sharing her own testimonial about using the product at home with her girls. The daughters are referenced, not filmed.
OLAY ran the same playbook at a much bigger scale this year. Its “Mom, You Were Right” campaign with Sarah Michelle Gellar, launched in May 2026, never puts a mother and daughter in the same frame either. The whole campaign is built on a single idea: women chase the latest trending product while overlooking the proof already in front of them, their own mother’s skin. It even offered a luxury mother-daughter photoshoot as a competition prize, which says something on its own. The generational credibility was worth dangling as the reward, not just the message.
Both approaches are valid, they just do different jobs. Putting the family member in frame, as Candy Kittens did, buys instant visual proof and comic tension. Having one generation speak on behalf of another, as Garth and OLAY both do, buys a different kind of trust: parent to parent, without needing a second talent contract at all. Knowing which one your brief actually needs matters more than defaulting to whichever looks more “authentic” on a moodboard.
The format works because the relationship is the proof
Where this gets useful for brand marketers is realising the mechanic isn’t really about beauty, or confectionery, or any single category. It’s a casting principle. Real family relationships carry credibility that no single-talent deal can manufacture, because the relationship itself is the evidence.
Some talent are already built for this. Kira Girard and her daughter Kalani Hilliker built a public profile as a genuine mother-daughter duo through the dance reality series Dance Moms, and that camera-tested rapport is exactly what a cross-generational brief needs instead of stitching two single-talent contracts together after the fact.
The brief that should change
If your last three campaigns cast a single face against a single age bracket, ask a harder question before the next one: who else in that household actually influenced the decision. The answer is often one generation away, and per the PwC data above, that influence is starting younger than most planning documents assume.
The brands getting ahead of this aren’t running two campaigns for two age groups. They’re running one, with a cast built to prove the point on its own.
If your next brief is still built around a single persona, it might be worth asking who else is in the room when the decision actually gets made. Get in touch and we’ll help you find the right pairing.