Marketing Turned Upside Down

How Gen Alpha Perceives Brand and Identity

Sri Harish Bijoor, founder of Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., was the speaker at a fireside chat in the Bharti Auditorium on 12th March 2026. Hosted by Prof. Maruthi Suresh and honoured by Prof. Rajendra Bandi, Dean of the School of Management Sciences, the session was about what Generation Alpha means for marketing, and why the current frameworks won’t survive it.

Bijoor framed his argument through the Brahma-Vishnu-Maheshwara cycle. Brahma creates, Vishnu sustains, Maheshwara destroys so that creation can begin again. Generation Alpha, he argued, is the Maheshwara of marketing: a generation that will tear down the assumptions that have governed brand strategy for decades. Brand loyalty is becoming service loyalty. Traditional status symbols are being questioned. The logic of persuasion is giving way to consultative and passive selling models.

Bijoor’s formulation: a brand is a thought that lives in a person’s mind. When the person changes, the thought must change or it becomes irrelevant. Generation Alpha is changing faster than any previous cohort. Design thinking, he argued, now matters more than branding alone, because product experience precedes and outlasts the campaign.