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Raja Rajamannar

Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, Mastercard

Search every verified Raja Rajamannar interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Raja Rajamannar, former Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Mastercard, appeared on the podcast In Other Words with host Jason Hemingway to discuss his decision to drop the Mastercard name from its own logo. He said he made the change after testing brand recognition across 26 countries and studying how the brain processes visual symbols versus written words. During the conversation, he also discussed the "Fifth Paradigm" of marketing, describing a shift in which consumers delegate search and purchase decisions to AI agents, and he noted that this changes how brands gain exposure and trust. Rajamannar also spoke about consumer trust, saying that audiences face a "trust deficit" across media, politics, and corporations. He discussed the importance of adapting marketing messages to local cultural contexts, citing an example from his time at Unilever involving an aftershave campaign that was successful in some cultures but objectionable in others. He recommended Marcondes, the CMO of Anheuser-Busch InBev, as a potential podcast guest. Rajamannar is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Quantum Marketing and spent 12 years as Mastercard's CMCO.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“When you look at trust, today consumers are suffering from a trust deficit everywhere around them. Whether it is the media... if there is one research survey or study that has happened, you've got two diametrically opposite interpretations of those from two different reputable credible channels of TV. So today I don't know whether to believe Fox Television here in the U.S or CNN... My point is media has become an are”

“It's a total transformation, right? It's a total disruption to how we are doing things today. So for example, a consumer is delegating their decisions for search or even for purchase. Agentic is obviously the purchase. Search is also completely changed from SEO to AEO to GEO. All that good stuff is happening, right? Now, when the entire discovery process is actually being changed, and it's actually being narrowed, ri”

“Shockingly, more than two-thirds of the CEOs have said they have zero confidence in their CMOs and in their marketing departments to drive profitable growth. Now, that is a disaster. The CMO role in many companies has been downgraded to report to somebody who reports to CEO to like the chief growth officer or the CRO or chief growth officer, chief revenue officer, chief customer officer. Now if you take away customer”

“I cut down my advertising budget by 70%. It is true till now. It's not just done once. We have taken permanently 70% of our advertising dollars out. Nothing happened to the business that is negative. I reinvested those dollars into other areas like experience experiential marketing for example or new platforms. We started something called priceless.com. We have invested in other areas and that actually has given us d”

“The dynamics are identical except credit cards are exceptionally efficient. And you have got healthcare system which is exceptionally broken. It's a disaster.”

“I said let's reduce our advertising budget by 70% and move that money to experiences, turning Priceless from an advertising platform into a holistic experiential marketing platform that creates priceless moments in people's lives.”

Other executives at Mastercard

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