“We look at our business as three levels. One is building the brand and protecting it. The second one is fueling and driving the business. And the third is creating platforms that will give the company a sustainable competitive advantage.”
— Raja Rajamannar

Raja Rajamannar, Chief Marketing Officer at Mastercard, joins Suzy Founder and CEO Matt Britton on the latest episode of The Speed of Culture podcast in collaboration with Adweek.

Raja is a transformative business leader. During his career, he managed large-scale businesses at Fortune 500 companies across financial services, consumer-packaged goods, and healthcare, including Unilever, Citigroup, Anthem, and Mastercard. AdWeek has named Raja as one of the Top 50 Most Tech Savvy CMOs in the World and one of the Top 50 CMOs Leading Charge to Transformation. Recently, Raja was also named one of the World's Most Innovative CMOs by Business Insider.

Today, Raja shares his perspective on the importance of experiential marketing, how to deliver a unique consumer experience, Mastercard's multisensory marketing strategy, and the brand's most recent financial services innovations.

• The Importance of Experiential Marketing - Over the years, Mastercard has done a great job at building an attractive brand that differentiates through its products, messaging, and communication. However, in an increasingly digital world, advertisements continue to clutter our lives and consumer attention is difficult to grasp. So Mastercard decided to shift towards experiential marketing, enhancing the brand's possibilities to curate and create delightful and fulfilling experiences for consumers.

• Multisensory Marketing - When it comes to senses, marketers typically focus only on sight and sound. Mastercard wants to deliver a full sensory experience that also involves taste, touch, and smell. For example, the brand delivers culinary experiences by organizing priceless tables you can find in unexpected places. Mastercard also started managing its own restaurants!

• Mastercard Sonic Brand Identity - Mastercard conducted detailed research to understand the effect of sound on the brain. Each sound impacts people's feelings and emotions differently. So the brand came up with its own sonic branding identity—how Mastercard presents itself as a sound. Raja and his team worked with musicians, neurologists, musicologists, and other industry professionals to develop a ten-layer architecture of Mastercard's sonic brand.

• Staying Innovative in Financial Services - Raja believes companies that stay ahead of innovation are the ones that will win in their industry, which is what Mastercard tries to do in the financial services space. For example, the company adopts financial services like crypto and NFTs, but it also goes beyond payments with the Mastercard healthcare business.

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