- Hey, I'm Sarah Franklin and welcome to a very special
live episode of "Connections".
We are here in Chicago at "Connections the Event"
and who better to bring on stage,
than the ever amazing long time CMO of MasterCard,
Raja Rajamannar.
You ready to do this?
- More than.
- Let's go.
- Let's do it.
- Hello everybody.
And most of all, importantly,
welcome Raja here to Connection.
- Thank you, thank you very much.
- We like to take the show back to people's beginnings,
and you grew up in Hyderabad.
- Correct.
- And your mother always taught you to diversify
what you do.
- That's true, yes.
- Can you share a little bit about that with us?
- Yeah, I had a very, you know interesting story
in the sense that my mom,
she was absolutely brilliant and she would always tell us
that we have got so many gifts that we have been given.
Don't just be narrow and focus yourself in one,
trying to realize all the gifts.
So I was a radio DJ.
I was also a cricketer.
I was also, 10 days table tennis, 10 days chess.
And I did not at the time
really realize what the importance is,
of doing so many different things.
It looks almost like being scatterbrained,
but actually it is not.
It's fantastic.
And you start experiencing different facets and each sport,
each area, it teaches you something different.
It builds a different aspect of you.
That's what I carried through throughout my life.
So even for example, as you know, in my career.
50% of the time I have been in marketing,
but the other 50% I was managing P&L'S,
and I have moved across multiple industries,
multiple geographies.
And each time I go to some new place,
it's a fantastic learning,
but also I bring my past learnings
to the current role and that's been invaluable to me.
- So something that I don't know that you know,
that we have in common.
Guess what I studied in college.
- Chemical engineering too?
- Yes!
- Oh, wow .
- So we share, so we're both chemical engineers.
- Yes.
- And we're both CMOs.
- Yes.
- So people ask me all the time,
I imagine they ask you,
chemical engineering, marketing.
How did you make that choice?
How did you make that journey, that shift?
- It's such an obvious transition, right?
I wanted to pursue further my studies
and I went to do my MBA.
And when I was doing it,
between the first and the second years,
I was in an internship
and I was supposed to do a project on logistics
for a color cosmetics company in India called LacPa.
I was sitting in that, one of the small cubicles,
and my boss was at the next cubicle.
And he was having conversation with the agency people.
And I was overhearing what was happening
because was no sound proof, anything of that sort.
And they were struggling to see,
in those days in south India, it just be very conservative
that women of "good character" do not use color cosmetics.
- Oh wow.
- That was a social thing, right.
It's very fascinating, if you see,
if you're putting color cosmetics on you
which means you're trying to draw attention to yourself,
and a good girl, or a good woman,
doesn't draw attention to herself.
It was a conservative thinking.
So they were trying to see how you can break
through the taboo,
and they were debating.
I listened to it for 15 full minutes,
leaving my project alone.
I said, why are this guys struggling so much?
It's so simple to me.
So I just took a piece of paper and I said, heading
"Is it bad to look good?"
- That's a brilliant question.
- Right? I just put that.
And then I wrote it.
I created almost like an advertisement on the spot.
And I went to them and said,
"Hey, do you think this will work for you?"
They looked, this is brilliant.
And at that time,
the chairman of the company happened to be visiting
Bangalore, which is where I did my project.
She saw it and said, "This is terrific."
They released it as a campaign
and it became a big hit, it won some awards.
- You won awards.
- Yes.
- Oh my gosh.
- Not me, the company won the award.
But then it gave me such a motivation.
I said, maybe I'm actually good at advertising.
And then I realized advertising is a part of marketing,
so I should become a marketing guy.
- Wow, that is an incredible story.
And also I love that your values were at the center there,
helping women feel great, feeling beautiful.
You've been at MasterCard now for over a decade.
How do you bring those values
into MasterCard the brand and keep it fresh and relevant?
- It's a privilege to be a CMO
because you have got a lot of things at your disposal.
You got an amazing team, you got resources, you got network,
you got a big company supporting you.
Most of the times
what I see is the company's marketing is reflective of the,
it's a projection of what the CMO wants to see manifest
for the company.
It is a huge responsibility.
And in my case, as I was growing up
my grandmother was blind,
and it was the duty of my sister and me to escort her
and show her throughout the home,
to even when she's sitting at the table,
we had to show her where the glass was,
where the plate was, where the items were,
the things we take so much for granted.
And 2019, there was South by Southwest.
That was probably one of the last physical events like this
that was happening.
I attended that.
I was coming out and somebody in the treasury department,
finance guy basically, he came and said
"Raja actually wanted to ask you something.
How come we don't have a card for blind people?"
I said, "Why did I not think about it before?"
So when I started looking at it,
I went and spoke to a few people who are blind and said
"How do you identify your card?
How do you know front of the card versus back of the card?
How do you know left
versus right upside down versus straight?
How do you know which is your debit card, credit card?
And how do you know, which is your MasterCard
versus any other card or which bank card it is?"
They don't.
They have positions that they tried to reserve.
And many times the positions get jumbled
in their wallet or in their purse.
- Wow.
- And they actually show it to somebody else.
And unfortunately
that somebody else is not always a good person.
They quickly take a picture of that,
and then they get that identity get stolen.
We said we had to fix it.
To me, The most simple thing was saying
that let's put braille on it because blind people, braille.
And then we discovered that that doesn't work,
because less than 10% of the people who are blind
can read braille.
So what's a solution?
It took us two years to solve it.
We came with a simple system of notches.
So if the notch is to your right,
you're holding the card orientation the right way.
If it is a semi circle, it means debit card.
If it is a half hexagon, it's a credit card.
If it is a V, it's a gift card.
And if there is a notch, it is a MasterCard.
We launched it with a beautiful ad,
which I felt very good about.
And we got kudos, till the time I received emails
from some blind people,
they said it appears, or it seems,
that you are produced a brilliant ad,
sadly I could not see it.
So I said, "Oh my God,
how can you make such fundamental, stupid errors?"
So we did a completely different ad
for the first time we used actual commentary
of what is on the screen to her voice.
So the ad actually is meant for blind people.
- [Announcer] She feels a half hexagon, her credit card.
She taps a terminal and takes her latte.
- Thank you.
- [Announcer] She steps outside and strides away from us.
- That's how I've been approaching and connecting the dots
to business results at the end of the day.
So the point is you project yourself
onto the work that you do.
So the values that you have, or the problems
that you had seen, you try to solve them.
So that's how have been approaching
and connecting the dots to business results,
at the end of the day.
Being a force for good,
you can also be a force for growth for your company.
And it's a happy marriage between the two.
- You've been just one of the most innovative CMOs
out there.
You're on every list and everybody admires you.
How do you bring that innovation in every day?
And how do you do things at a fast pace?
- Thank you for your kind words, but you know, it's, I think
as the leader of the team, you get this proportionate credit
for what is happening.
In terms of innovation,
my first thing is to have the right team in place.
People who are Unbound in their thinking
and who are willing to really go beyond,
above and beyond to everything without any constraints.
When I was in Unilever, I was sent
to a workshop called creativity workshop in Mumbai,
and it was done by a monk from Tibet,
and one of the most unbelievable kind of training programs.
It didn't feel like a training program.
It more felt like a yoga camp.
And there was a lot of yoga in it.
There was a lot of meditation in it.
And he said,
"I'll sort of break some of the molds
of your thinking and constraints."
He says, "Do you think you can leave your body
and go out of your body?"
Well, I'm a chemical engineer, like you are.
You're a little logical.
You say, mm that's all like a little, no,
you don't believe that kind of nonsense.
And I went through that experience,
along with my peers at the time, it was mind blowing.
It frees you from the logical way of thinking, right?
You talk about, it's not logic, it's always magic.
So as marketers, we have to try to be magical, not logical,
number one.
Number two, having the right team.
And number three, most importantly, what I find is
in this day and age, you can create that magic
not just by yourself,
but through partnerships.
Most of the best innovative ideas that I have ever received,
were not from my team only,
but they were from outside
and they were tiny startups, for example.
So I keep making it a point to go to Israel,
to go to Ireland, and Poland, and India,
talk to those people
and actually have like the speed dating with entrepreneurs.
That's one of my big things,
every time I go,
and they come up with brilliant ideas,
and at least probably 95%
of them are not relevant to what they do.
But that 5% is so rich,
that trip, it pays for itself a thousand times.
But as a CMO, the biggest thing is to evangelize
for your team and for your ideas.
Once the whole company is behind you and with you,
things happen.
- So speaking of things, happening and ideas,
you have this big idea around multisensory sounds, smell.
Explain that to us.
- If you ask the most basic question:
how do you communicate with somebody?
Normally you talk, they listen.
When you bring a second dimension,
when they're looking at you in zoom or in person,
it adds a lot more depth and richness to that interaction.
The communication is deeper.
The point is, if you add more layers of these senses
beyond sight and sound,
in theory,
the communication and the engagement
should become much better.
The vast majority of the people are blessed
with five senses.
Why is it that as marketers, we only rely on two?
So there is optimization of the current sense
that you're using and adding new senses.
So can we add the sense of taste
to marketing your product?
Can you add the sense of smell to your marketing mix?
So we went into, for example
creating what we call "Priceless tables".
So the first Priceless table was on a billboard
in Manhattan, near Times Square.
And we curated a phenomenal dinner there
with celebrities and with Michelin star chefs.
And it just got sold out in a minute.
The whole experience is uniquely associated with MasterCard
because we curated it.
We branded it.
We had special dishes which were MasterCard dishes.
To many it looked like a silly idea.
We persisted, we went through it.
Now we are at a stage where we are launching restaurants.
So what a thousand ads could have done,
it's exceeded by the single experience
of being at one of these Priceless tables,
and it's been working.
And the proof of the pudding is my budget is much, much
much smaller than any of my competitors.
And we started few years back
at number 87 in the top hundred brands.
Today, we are at number 10 globally.
- Wow, congratulations.
- Thank you.
In the us, we are at number eight.
And the audio brand that we launched, Identity,
and the audio particularly,
if you look at something
like your smart speakers and wearables,
there is not enough visual real estate
to manifest to your brand.
So you need to utilize other media,
in this case it is sound.
So we launched our Sonic brand,
which for the 30th in a row,
has been named the number one audio brand
in the world.
We started to get into music.
We launched our first song in Latin America.
It became number one of the charts in 12 countries.
Next coordinated can,
We are releasing our first music album.
It's just very different journey altogether, completely.
That's what we call multi-sensory.
And the key thing is it's not obvious,
but that's the beauty of it.
If it's obvious everyone would have already done it by now.
And if you connect the dots,
the impact is disproportionately superior.
- What you're doing along that way is also building trust.
Everybody trusts,
when they come to a Priceless restaurant,
they're gonna have a great experience.
How important is trust in a brand.
- Trust was always important,
but now it is vital.
There is a complete trust deficit all around us.
The same event
as seen on Fox,
as seen on CNN,
like they're completely opposite to each other.
Ordinary Americans, ordinary people,
they just don't know.
They can't trust TV.
They can't trust brands.
Brands have been practicing deceptive marketing forever,
unfortunately.
They want transparency.
They want to believe you.
And if you can provide that kind of a belief in trust,
it's gonna be game changing.
- Well, it's been such a pleasure.
The time has just flown talking with y'all today.
We've had so much fun, right?
Yes.
- Thank you, thank you very much folks.
- So Raja, thank you so much
for joining us here today on Connections.
It's been a pleasure.
- Thank you for having me.
- Thanks everybody.
- Much appreciated, thank you everyone.