SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — Raja Rajamannar, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at Mastercard, opened his talk at AD STARS 2021 with an alarming statistic: studies show that more than 70% of CEOs have no confidence in their Chief Marketing Officers: “They don’t have any confidence that their marketing teams will drive their business because they don’t understand the business,” he said.
Many companies are doing away with the role of CMO and replacing them with new roles: chief growth, revenue, or customer officer. But when you add these roles, what’s left for the CMO? They no longer have responsibility for pricing, products, place (distribution and logistics) – only promotion. As a result, marketing is losing its seat at the table.
Why is it so? Rajamannar believes that traditionally, marketers were right-brained thinkers: creative, intuitive, with an understanding of emotions. But in the 1990s, the world changed. The internet and data analytics entered the field, and marketers started feeling a little out of place.
“Many couldn’t get their heads around data analytics and started getting left behind,” says Rajamannar.
When asked to justify their expenditure, they continued to speak the language of marketing: brand awareness, net promoter scores, brand predisposition.
“The moment you give a marketing answer to a business question, it looks like you don’t know the numbers or the contribution you’re making. It has led to an erosion of trust and credibility.”
Where we are right now & why
Marketing has been practised since antiquity – but it has always kept evolving. Originally, the focus was all around product: if you nail the product, packaging, and price, people will buy based on logical, rational behaviour.
Then marketers discovered that consumers don’t make decisions rationally but are driven by emotions and feelings, which led to the rise of emotional marketing. Mastercard’s ‘Priceless’ campaign remains an astoundingly successful example.
In the mid-1990s, the internet arrived and changed the game again when marketers discovered data – previously the field of economists and geeks. This phase lasted only until 2007, when social media made its debut and marketing had to go through another reinvention. According to Rajamannar, marketing is in its fourth paradigm, and on the verge of its fifth.
“AR, IoT, autonomous driving, drones, blockchain, VR – they are all coming at us like a tsunami. They are going to disrupt people’s lives and challenge marketers in an unprecedented way. Already, a number of classical marketing approaches are breaking down: desire, action, satisfaction, price elasticity – the rules have completely changed. Everything is being put on its head.”
What is it we should do?
“We need to redesign every aspect of marketing. Ask: is it valid? If not, how do you change it for the future? How do we reimagine marketing? In the past, that’s exactly what happened: when classical physics failed, quantum physics came in. In exactly the same way: classical marketing is breaking down; we need to reinvent modern marketing,” warns Rajamannar.
“There is so much change ahead of us. AI to going to be single biggest disruptor and enabler of marketing: if you don’t know how to use these technologies, you’ll become obsolete very quickly. You have to educate yourself. You have to become data savvy or surround yourself with people who are. You need to be a general manager not a marketing specialist; you need to connect the dots; you need to evangelize your role in the C-suite.”
Despite the risk of obsolescence facing CMOs, Rajamannar there is no better time to be in marketing than now.
“When technology and data advance in a dramatic way, they democratize the field of marketing. And when the playing field becomes level, you need marketing to stay ahead, to differentiate. Marketing is going to be hugely important – if you know how to absorb, learn, stay current, train people, set up the right infrastructure, you can win in a big, big way.”
Raja Rajamannar is the author of ‘Quantum Marketing: Mastering The New Marketing Mindset For Tomorrow’s Consumers’. Watch his AD STARS 2021 talk on demand via adstars.org.
