The single biggest reason why marketers have lost their level of influence is because, number one, they did not understand the business dynamics. They did not put any effort to learn the business completely in a way that the CFO and CEO understand and to connect the dots between marketing investments and business outcomes in a credible fashion. And CEOs have lost patience. In fact, there was a study which was done about seven years back. The study said that an overwhelming 80% plus majority of CEOs say that they have zero confidence, zero confidence in their CMOs and in their marketing teams to drive sustained profitable growth.
Welcome to Time for Reset, the marketing podcast that gets behind the thinking of the industry's sharpest leaders shaping the world's most iconic brands. We ask the big questions. What does it take to drive real change? How do you stay ahead when the rules keep evolving? From shifting consumer expectations to marketing's seat in the boardroom, every episode dives into what's working, what's not, and what's next. Expect smart conversations, real-world insights, and a bold perspective on modern marketing leadership. Let's hit reset and turn strategy into action. Now, into the conversation.
We have the wonderful Raja here from Mastercard. He is a senior fellow at Mastercard and very recently was the CMO at Mastercard for 12 years. He has an incredible background. He is an award-winning author, an award winner across our industry. WFA, ANA, Forbes, you name it, he's had the awards. He's had a very varied career across healthcare. He's worked at Unilever. He's worked at Citibank. So, a very wide range of backgrounds and different sort of roles in different stages of his career. So, welcome Raja. We're very excited to have you on the podcast today.
Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it, Fiona.
So Raja, we always start our podcast asking everybody, and you in particular, this would be fascinating for me because you've worked in the industry for such a long time and had such a varied career, that asking the question to you of what would you hit the reset button on in the marketing industry. I'm very interested to hear what you will say.
I think it's not about resetting the button on any aspect of marketing within the industry, but my reset will be to the entire field and function of marketing. Marketing as we have been practicing, the theories and concepts, the basis of which we are practicing today, they are more than six decades old. They were formulated by the likes of Dr. Philip Kotler, and at the time there was no internet, there was no digital, there was no mobile, there was no social media, there was no artificial intelligence. So one of the things I started seriously asking is, are those theories and frameworks which were suggested six, seven decades back, are they still valid today? Are they like the laws of physics which don't change with time and sort of timeless? But I quickly came to the conclusion, no, they're not timeless. They actually change quite a lot. They have to be changed. And I started coming up with various hypotheses and putting them into practice at Mastercard to see if my hypothesis is correct or I'm hallucinating. And I came to the conclusion eventually that everything, all the way from insights which is the first step of marketing, all the way to customer retention, customer upsell, cross-sell, and everything in between, the entire marketing value chain has to be reset. And the new way of re-imagining marketing, of what marketing is, what I call as quantum marketing, is a subject in the title of my book that I wrote almost four and a half, five years back.
And I was going to ask you, and you've touched on a few of the major themes that are happening in our industry right now, like not just the introduction of agentic AI, but the whole way people are consuming content, the use of large language models, and how you're even accessing those customers is changing so much. You've stepped into this new role at Mastercard away from your original CMO role there. First of all, what led to that change for you, and how has that changed your focus within Mastercard?
So the average lifespan of a CMO in the entire industry is actually less than three years. Yes, I have already spent 12 years, and I can keep sitting and occupying that seat forever. But I wanted to do other things as well. And so I had a detailed conversation, discussion with the Mastercard CEO. And eventually what I have decided is to leave the role behind as of 1st of January 2026 and still be associated with Mastercard as a senior fellow for the next couple of years, but to pursue a whole bunch of things that I always wanted to do. And if I don't do them today, I'll be too old to do them tomorrow. So I joined Harvard Business School as an executive fellow. I also simultaneously joined Yale School of Management also as an executive fellow. And the idea is that I'll be interacting with the professors predominantly to try and re-imagine marketing and based on that come up with a curriculum with which students are taught in MBA. And I'll also be doing guest lectures at the executive development programs at both Harvard as well as Yale, and very excited about that part of it. I also have joined a private equity company as a senior adviser, which gives me exposure to a completely different world. And I joined the McLaren team as an advisory board member, and Formula 1 is a more recent passion for me, and I'm very excited about it. So I joined that. So I'm doing a ton of things that I always wanted to do and feel enriched and fulfilled.
Such a great time to be working with universities on resetting the curriculum, isn't it, Raja? Because it's changed so dramatically from when you might have studied marketing back in the day, and certainly some of the recent studies that I had done, it's like half of it's just not even relevant anymore.
So true. I know. I went to my MBA school 41 years back. So nothing that was taught there is really relevant today. Almost all of it is not relevant. So I think the time is ripe for us to really restart and, to your point, just reset how marketing is taught. And I'm very excited about that.
And you have talked a lot about this, and I've seen you talk about this in some of the panels, of like how marketing had lost its influence over time. And certainly when you talk about tenure of CMOs, of that very short turnaround, you've got a very short window to be successful and prove the value of marketing as a growth engine in a business, right? What do you think the single biggest mistake marketers have made to put themselves into that situation?
See, I think you're being very kind when you say that marketers have lost a lot of their influence. I think in many cases marketing has totally lost its stature, its gravitas, and also its position at the seat of the table of the CEO. Many CMO roles have been eliminated. Many CMOs have been pushed a level lower and no longer reporting to the CEO. And in many other cases, companies are bringing new suite executives like chief growth officer, chief revenue officer, chief customer officer. And if you take a step back and say, if I'm a CMO and I don't look at revenue, I don't look at customers, I don't look at growth, then what am I looking at, right? It's very stunning how marketing has lost its relevance and significance, unfortunately. And the single biggest reason for that, for me, is I think marketers classically have come from the creative side of the house, from the right side brain. So about psychology, sociology, design, anthropology, and the art of storytelling and things like that, they were excellent. Like in the '70s, '80s, that was really riding the wave. But with the advent of internet where data has come about in a significant way and technology started playing a real significant role, the classical marketers were caught a little bit like deer caught in headlights. They froze, they didn't know what to do, and a new breed of marketers started coming called the performance marketers. You do this today, what's my result tomorrow? It's such a short-term, transactional marketing activity that's being done. And CFOs and CEOs found that transactional thing very good because they feel that they are exactly able to measure what they're getting for their marketing investment and they can turn the dial up or down depending on how the results are. And so it was more within the grasp and comprehension of the CFOs and CEOs. Now I have been on both sides of the house, which is I have been managing P&Ls and I managed a company like Diners Club where I had marketers reporting to me. When they would ask my head of marketing what exactly did we get for the money we have put, they give me some fluffy answers like our brand awareness has gone up, our predisposition has gone up, and our preference has gone up, net promoter scores have gone up. The point is these are such long-tail, later-in-time metrics that a CEO or CFO, when their tail is on fire, they want solutions for here and now. So the single biggest reason why marketers have lost their level of influence is because, number one, they did not understand the business dynamics. They did not put any effort to learn the business completely in a way that the CFO and CEO understand and to connect the dots between marketing investments and business outcomes in a credible fashion. And CEOs have lost patience. In fact, there was a study which was done about seven years back. So it's not that old and it's still relevant even today. I believe it is McKinsey, but I stand corrected if it is not. But the study said that an overwhelming 80% plus majority of CEOs say that they have zero confidence, zero confidence in their CMOs and in their marketing teams to drive sustained profitable growth.
Wow. That's a pretty damning indictment, isn't it? On that...
I think it's really interesting you say that too in a world where, especially when you're moving more towards particularly agentic shopping, those types of things, that actually having a good brand marketing storyteller is even more important now. But I think the most successful CMOs I've seen are the ones who are both fantastic brand storytellers and can speak in terms of data and outcomes. And when you combine those, incredibly powerful. But when you're only talking about one side of marketing, you've got one arm tied behind your back effectively. So it's so interesting because more and more what we're starting to see now is more of that creative storytelling, brand marketing start to come back in the fold again because in a world of AI and mass-produced content, creative, where's the differentiation going to come in again? It's going to be with the creative storytelling, right? So it's a fascinating cycle. We've got...
Cycle that comes back. Exactly.
So that being said, then what are the capabilities that separate a really good strategic marketer from a tactical one? Because you talked a lot about performance marketing there, which works for a time and there's a lot of people that have invested heavily in performance marketing that don't really understand that long-term brand implications until it's too late. So you know, what would you say are the ones that stand out for you as capabilities for a real strategic marketer?
So firstly, the best marketers that I have seen, they are general managers. They are not marketing specialists. They are general managers who understand how their business works. They are business managers first and foremost with a deep expertise of marketing. But they are not just marketing experts, number one. Number two, they have incredible conviction and communication skills. Conviction that some abstract ideas, though may not be quantifiable at that moment in time, if their intuition, gut feel, experience, and the appreciation tells them that this is going to work, they need to be convinced about it and not be easily moved around. They cannot be backing off. If they think it is something really good, they should have the spine to stand up and say, 'This is going to work and I'm going to stick my neck out.' And to communicate that effectively in a language that the CFO and the CEO understand. The CMO today is the ultimate connector. So if you look at marketing, it is at the confluence of so many functions. Now marketing has become very tech-driven. So if you don't understand technology, you are a bad marketer and you should be able to speak the language of your CTO or CIO and be able to effectively partner with them. And they will just be dismissive of you if you don't know about technology. They don't have time and patience for you. They can easily spin some mumbo jumbo and you are lost and then they just move on and then you're left behind. So you need to know technology. Marketing has been data-intense and data-driven. Now it is even more data-intense than ever before. With everything around us getting connected, we are gathering so much of information and so much of data. How do you make sense out of it and how do you put it to good use in a responsible way? So you need to have a quantitative mindset. So if you don't understand data, you're gone. Number three, you need to understand finance because your CFO can be your biggest pain or your biggest ally. And I found that my CFO has always been my best buddy because we speak the same language and she understands my situation and I understand their situation and we are empathetic and then we work together as a team. Like for example, three, four years back, I remember I took my CFO and we did a joint session on the center stage at Cannes Lions and I wanted to demonstrate that CFO-CMO partnership and how critical it is. So I would say my best buddy in the company is my CFO, Sachin. You need to be a real leader. Which means when you are in a meeting, when you're at the CEO table, don't just be a functional specialist who talks about your function, but talk about the business. Participate, ask questions, be a full-fledged person, holistic person, business person, and also be an advocate of talent and a developer of talent because you cannot do everything yourself. And best talent, in my days, 41 years back when I graduated from my MBA, marketing was a top function. The best students, the toppers as we used to call, the valedictorians as they call in the US, they would all go to marketing because that's seen to be creative. It's very pragmatic and a lot of very glamorous. You travel a lot, you meet interesting people. It's an exciting field, right? Today marketing is one of the lowest desired functions in MBA schools or in colleges for any, whether MBA or otherwise. It is ranking only above two functions: accounting and nursing.
Wow, that's a big decline as well, isn't it?
That's how low we have stooped down to, right, as a function. That's unfortunate. We really slipped. So the key thing is today if you want to get the best marketing talent, we want people who think with right brain, left brain, general managers, top talent, great stuff. Those people don't want to come into marketing. They want to go and start a company in Silicon Valley or somewhere, or they want to join an investment bank and mint lots of money, or they want to be in consulting because of the variety and the scope that they have got. Nobody wants to come into marketing. Therefore, how do you actually attract the right talent? And because they are not coming fully prepared because what is being taught in colleges is so obsolete, how do you really train them, develop them, and help them grow and realize their career dreams and aspirations? In my days again, I would say if you got promoted in three years, you consider yourself to be a fast riser. Today, 18 months, and people say, 'How come I'm not yet promoted?'
Yeah, I was going to say the expectation is a lot shorter than that now.
Exactly. They want things to happen in a hurry. Oh, I've been in this job. What we used to actually say at Citibank when I was there, they said year one is learning. Year two, you're actually beginning to make the changes that are needed. Year three, you're performing extremely well. Year four is when you see whether it was a flash in the pan or it is a consistent thing. So typically four years is where you stay in a given stint. The new generation of folks, four years, 'This is my lifetime, I'm not going to stay that long.'
Six months attempting to be onboarded and performing.
So how do you keep such folks engaged, inspired, motivated, and continuing to grow? So you need to be a real people leader in that sense. So the combination of all this is what is Leonardo da Vinci.
I was going to say as well, one that we see a lot more now is you got to be an operations specialist as well because so much of the actual marketing operations spans the layers of every part of the organization. So you're dealing with sales systems, sales people and process, and then you're dealing with the finance team, the billing organization. There's a whole range of different touch points. The technology team, and if you don't understand how they all fit together and stitch together, the handoffs are a nightmare. You're redoing work, things are slow, all of those good things. And I think to your point, Raja, about the capabilities, we're starting to see a real trend now that people are moving across into marketing that have already been working in other roles and move into different areas of marketing as a result of having exposure to the marketing team and realizing it's actually quite an interesting job, but not necessarily wouldn't have been their first choice at university, but you know, might move over from a sales position or from an operations, straight operations job, a media practitioner or whatever. It's a little bit more fluid now than what it was. You know, I don't know too many people that work in marketing today that went to university and did a marketing degree.
True. That's absolutely true. And in fact, there are some companies, and I don't know how it is with Unilever these days. When I was working with them, we used to have a rotation program. They call it job rotation. So you start in sales, then you go into marketing. And marketing had all the four Ps of marketing, not just one P of marketing. Then you go and spend time in a business as a finance person, then you become a business leader, and then it keeps going up. But by the time you reached a decision-maker level like a CMO equivalent, you are so well-rounded. And people had stints in R&D as well, across the board. So I think that kind of a philosophy is more valid today than it ever was.
