Raja Rajamannar is chief marketing officer of Mastercard and also runs one of its businesses. His diagnosis of why the role is being eliminated is structural rather than personal, and he starts from the textbook. Marketing was defined by four responsibilities. In many organizations it now holds a fragment of one.
He names the companies without softening it, and treats the pattern as a warning rather than an anomaly.
Key findings
- His first cause is abdication rather than displacement. As data and technology became the operating layer of the discipline, marketers did not take charge of them, and other functions now set the agenda.
- The second is the answer marketers give when asked what the money bought. Reporting awareness, predisposition and promoter scores to a chief financial officer reads as evasion, and the credibility lost is the function’s rather than the individual’s.
- He also reports that the damage has reached recruitment. In association research, marketing does not appear among the leading choices for business students, and some of them regard it as a confidence trick.
- His own worry is not that the title disappears but what replaces it. Companies do feel the absence and hire back, but sometimes hire someone who has never done the work.
Social good at arm’s length, and social good inside the business model
Mastercard carved roughly a tenth of its equity into an independent foundation at flotation. Rajamannar’s point about the design is the deliberate separation: its own chief executive, its own board, and no commercial interest in the way.
The structural advantage he identifies is that it does not depend on anybody’s appetite in a given year, because a fixed share of assets must be deployed annually.
What matters more in his account is the instruction that came next. A foundation is not a license to stop, and the chief executive asked for social good to be built into the business rather than beside it.
A promotion that pays for itself
The mechanism Rajamannar built ties a contribution to a transaction. In one long-running partnership, each card use during a European promotion funded a meal, administered by an agency that knows how to do it.
The second partnership was chosen for where the money does not otherwise go. Research funding follows incidence, so cancers affecting smaller populations attract little of it.
The commercial result is stated carefully. Share of spending in the promoted category rises during the promotion, falls back afterwards, and settles above where it started.
That is what makes the model repeatable rather than dependent on goodwill. It does not require an argument for a larger marketing budget.
A purpose that kept changing
Rajamannar’s account of finding his own purpose is unusual in refusing the tidy version. He describes a modest childhood and parents who took him to an old people’s home and to orphanages on his own birthdays.
He declines to call that a purpose. He calls it a predisposition, which is a more honest word for what a childhood gives you.
The purpose he did name, in his twenties, was the environment, and he built two degrees around it. What he learned instead is that the thing itself moves.
Where it settled is a statement about leverage rather than about a cause: use whatever access and resource you have, wherever it will do the most.
He also admits to keeping a dashboard against it, which he cheerfully calls nerdy.
What the job actually is
Rajamannar reduces the role to three obligations. Build a brand for the long term, drive the business as a multiplier rather than a cost, and be the company’s largest competitive advantage.
To that he adds an argument about capacity rather than duty. Marketers hold resources, creative range and reach that no other function can claim, and that is why the social obligation attaches to them.
His summary of the resulting person is deliberately demanding, and he does not pretend otherwise.
Two ways to get there
The first is rotation out of the discipline, and his argument for it is about language. You return able to speak the way the rest of the company speaks.
The second is a standing appointment with himself. Five hours every weekend, blocked in the calendar, protected from his family, spent on a course or a subject he has decided to learn.
He points out that the material is mostly free unless you want the certificate, and that the other route is simply asking an expert to teach you.
Holding the platforms to account collectively
Rajamannar’s argument for the industry body is about the arithmetic of influence. A single brand with good intentions has no leverage over a platform. The advertisers collectively fund the whole ecosystem.
The coalition includes the platforms themselves, and the work he describes is unglamorous and specific: define harmful content, get third-party audits accepted, agree reporting standards.
The parallel initiative on the American side exists because marketing is not seen as a growth driver, and the remedy is shared material rather than exhortation.
Culture is changed by rotation, not by preaching
The most transferable idea in the conversation is a personnel rule. At Mastercard, a general manager must have done a rotation through marketing before reaching the executive suite.
The reasoning is that the value of the function cannot be taught to people who have never done it.
The second lever he describes is the innovation program, opened beyond the marketing department. The idea he cites as the best of the year came from the treasury function and has been filed as a patent.
Quantum marketing, and two things he says are dead
The frame for his book is borrowed from physics. Classical mechanics held for centuries and then broke at extremes of scale and speed, which required a new field rather than a correction.
His claim is that marketing has reached its own extreme, with a run of technologies arriving at once, and that the discipline as practised will not survive contact with it.
The first thing he declares finished is advertising in its familiar form, and the case is built from attention, fragmentation and active dislike.
The second is loyalty, and the argument is deliberately uncomfortable. If a large share of people break a commitment they made formally, with consequences attached, expecting fidelity to a brand is not a plan.
The campaign that could not fail
Asked for the moment that humbled him, Rajamannar names a complete solution he built in Dubai and was certain about.
It did not merely fail. It produced a public crisis, and the lesson he draws is about the line item cut first.
His closing instruction is aimed at exactly the confidence that produced it.
Scope and limitations
This is one executive’s account, recorded in October 2020, and the figures for the foundation, the partnerships and the share-of-wallet effect are his own statements rather than published results. The forecasts about advertising and loyalty are the argument of a book he was promoting at the time.
Source
This page summarises HGS #10: Raja Rajamannar (CMO, Mastercard) shares his wins, failures and how CMO’s drive purpose, by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2022-02-14.