What 12 Years at Mastercard Taught One of the World’s Most Influential CMOs

Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.

I think it has been probably one of the most transformative periods in my own personal career, which spans more than four decades. And literally every single aspect of marketing we started questioning and saying, is this the right way to do? Is there a better way to do? Because all the theories of marketing have been formulated more than six decades back when there was no mobile, no internet, no social media, no artificial intelligence. So we said, should the approach to marketing be completely re-imagined? And with that promise, I started looking at every aspect. Firstly, some of the big things that we have done. I started questioning the effectiveness of advertising because there is so much clutter and because the span of attention of human beings is coming down pretty dramatically. How effective is advertising really? And because we have got transaction data as a payments company, we could really measure the effectiveness and correlate with a true causal relationship. And I found that advertising was not great in terms of effectiveness. It's not because we were doing bad advertising or anything of that sort. But I said advertising as a medium to drive things and make the kind of results happen to do so. I took a first big bet where I cut down my marketing budget or advertising budget by more than 70% and moved it into experiences because the need to communicate and connect with consumers and customers still exists. That doesn't disappear. But the medium of how you connect and communicate changes completely. And I went into experiential marketing headlock. That was a huge bet. Thankfully, it paid us off in oodles. So we started this entire journey on creating experiential platforms and we even acquired a company which actually sourced experiences, curated experiences at scale around the world. That was the first big one. Second, one of the promises that I started operating with is that people have five senses: the sense of sight, sound, touch, taste. So I said, why is it that we rely as marketers only on two of these senses? Can we truly be multi-sensory and immersive and is it going to change? So I started visiting each sense. For example, when you look at the sense of sight, the brand manifestation is typically in the logo. And a logo, when you look at it, it's a simple representation in classical marketing which connotes some positive feelings. But we went at it very scientifically. And what I found, for example, is that the elements of logo which are visual are processed by a different part of the brain than the verbal part or the word part of the logo, which goes through the prefrontal cortex, which is very different. So I said, let's drop the word Mastercard from our logo completely. And I still remember my conversation with Ajay Banga that day, who was my boss and he was the CEO. Then I walked into his office and said, Ajay, I got a great idea. He said, what? I said, let's drop our name from our logo. He looked at me literally like I had three heads and he said, Raja, how can we do it? I gave the logic and how the whole thing is. And the beauty is I have been given a lot of freedom and flexibility to do and experiment, and this was a big bet even for him and for the whole company. And the board approved it and then we went and did it. And it was one of the best things that we have done. So that creating that symbol brand or the iconic brand was something fantastic as one example.

True. So it was at both right. First and foremost, there has to be a hard logic behind why I'm doing it. Is there science backing up my hypothesis or is it just my gut feel? So people are not going to marketers love right, gut feel. So this was scientifically backed and I had all the research done. And we took actually two years to create the right combination of the circles. For example, we used the red and yellow circles in the past, but the shades of each color have a very different emotional resonance with people. So I actually played around with those. The shape, though they are just two interlocking circles, the extent of overlap between the two circles mattered a lot. We got something called the golden ratio, which is in the Italian architecture, Roman architecture. So we brought those kind of elements and all. And truly this is one of the biggest steps we have taken in terms of transformation. And today even without our name, there is an 84% recognition of our brand just by looking at the logo, saying this is Mastercard. That was a big one. And going along the journey of experiential marketing and multi-sensory marketing, I created a sonic identity for the company. It is not just a jingle which is so 1940s and 1930s, and created a complete comprehensive sonic architecture with the ten layers and so on. Now this has been rated now for this five years in a row as the world's number one audio brand. And our sonic is actually heard multiple times every single day at 2.9 billion points of sale around the world, which is free earned media for me. So that was one kind of a thing. One of the most meaningful things that we have done, I feel, is purpose-driven approach to marketing. Marketing is typically seen as a force for growth. And I said, can it also be a force for good, just not growth? And the two are not mutually exclusive. While we are not International Red Cross doing only philanthropic things, when you layer in the philanthropic or the societal good into your campaigns, it can be profoundly transformative for your brand and for your business. This was a big hypothesis. There were a lot of people in the company, of course, who challenged me and that as they should. They said, look, we have created Mastercard Foundation, which is one of the most, I believe it is one of the top two or three largest corporate foundations in the world. It's got some $50 billion plus in assets and so on. So having created that and they're doing a lot of good job, should we as marketing also do things around philanthropy? My answer is yes, because business and social good are not mutually exclusive. They're very interlaced. So our program with Stand Up to Cancer, for example, where we raised more than $75 million, has resulted in finding cures for eight different types of cancers and an early methodology for early detection of ovarian cancer. And these eight cures have been FDA approved. So from molecule to FDA approval in the last 12 years, we have eight drugs. That's phenomenal. But on the other hand, what does it do to the business? We ran this fundraising through various promotions. For example, I said in the United States during eight weeks in the year, if anyone uses their Mastercard at a restaurant instead of using some other payment form, we will contribute a small percentage of our profit to Stand Up to Cancer Foundation and help them with methodologies for research, stage gating process. During the promotion, because customers are not paying anything extra, they're happy to use because they feel they're contributing something. It's a nice feeling for them. The share of Mastercard in restaurants actually grows up. So the restaurant category is growing at 8%. During the promotion period we are growing at 14%. After the promotion is over it comes down but still settles above the 8% at 8.2 or 8.3, which means there is a permanent share gain that I have got. And that permanent share gain more than makes up for the contribution I'm making to Stand Up to Cancer. So this has got a beautiful flywheel effect where you're creating momentum doing the social good first. So I keep saying, when you pursue purpose, profits will definitely follow. And that's exactly what has been. So whether it is with World Food Program where we're contributing hundreds of millions of meals to children in a deprived part of the society, or we have been doing things like Priceless Planet. So Priceless Planet is all about planting trees and climate change and things like that. We're doing for wildlife protection of endangered species. We have a Wildlife Impact Card. So all these things, when I look at it, it's most gratifying to see that we made a difference at scale around the world. And I think that's something which gives me enormous amount of joy. So there have been a lot of significant things and I look back with tremendous amount of satisfaction and pride.

So firstly, I feel very grateful that based on all the testing that I had done and piloting of concepts at Mastercard, that I could write that book called Quantum Marketing. So it comes from experience, and a lot of thinking behind it, and some wisdom, some hypothesis which are looking into the future and trying to prognosticate and say, is this likely to happen? And if this happens, what do marketers do? And that book went on to become a Wall Street Journal bestseller, published in 14 languages. And I feel very grateful for that. A lot of things I have written in the book we started actually implementing at Mastercard. For example, in the book which was published in 2021, I talked about artificial intelligence, and internally we call it augmented intelligence. This was before gen AI came around. So this is four years before, or three years before gen AI came, I actually said that life is going to be different when artificial intelligence comes in. And I started implementing AI in various marketing programs, whether it is in B2B marketing or B2C marketing or consumer insights or across the entire spectrum of marketing activities. It was game-changing for us on the one hand for productivity, and on the other hand for opening the doors for newer types of creativity. It was huge, and the impact was very visible. And this is AI as just one example. And then we went into neuromarketing, we went into behavioral economics and the practical sides of behavioral economics in the marketing context. For example, do you run a promotion which says buy one get one free, or give 50% off? The economic value is the same, but the emotional payoff is very different. How do you actually get these to marry the two? So those are the kind of things I experimented extensively. And all this, the point you touched before is so valid. It's not just Raja feeling it at his gut level. I need to have justification because we spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually around the world. And it has to be money well spent, and I'm accountable for those results that are being generated with credible linkages that it is my activities and strategies which are driving results, as opposed to them happening independently on their own. So if you look at three dimensions: number one is on the brand side. When I joined the company, we were at number 87 in the world's top 100 brands. Today we are at number 12. And this is in spite of the fact that we are outspent by competition at least two to two and a half times. So with a much lower investment, we are really kicking the backsides of other people, which is a cheap thrill, but it's fun.

It's fine. So we really are spending money very effectively and getting fantastic results. On the brand side, I think we have done a phenomenal job. We also do things like Brand Affection Index, so how people feel the affinity towards a brand. We have overtaken some of the biggest lifestyle brands in the world. In payments, we are way ahead of anybody else. But even beyond payments, some of the top brands in the world, we are ahead of them, which is such a good feeling. On the second level, are we driving business in a measurable way? Whether winning deals, whether we are growing our business fast, whether we are gaining market share now with any given client, whether we're increasing our profitability, every single aspect of this, we have been seeing very tangible, measurable results which were attributable to marketing activities. And the third one, are we building platforms like priceless.com, Mastercard Gamer Exchange, Mastercard Design Studio? And all these platforms, are they giving us a competitive advantage in the marketplace? So these three keys: building and nurturing and protecting the brand, driving and growing profitable business, and third, establishing platforms for competitive advantage. On all the three dimensions, we're hitting the ball out of the park.