Raja Rajamannar is a true giant in the field of marketing. President of the World Federation of Advertising and CMO of Mastercard since 2013, Raja argues in his latest book, Quantum Marketing, that there is no such thing as brand loyalty. Raja warns marketers not to mistake consumers liking your brand for consumer loyalty to it. What marketers confuse for brand loyalty is merely brand stickiness. Marketers need to understand the true drivers for customer choices in order to leverage them and encourage stickiness.
Raja shares his advice for marketers just getting started building their careers. The most important thing is trying to stay ahead of the curve – grounded in commercial realities. The second thing is to have formal internal and external mentors. Third thing is networking, both internally and externally. All of this is facilitated by a strong work ethic, dependability and know-how.
If he could start over from the beginning, Raja would spend a lot more time learning about technology and consulting, where you get exposure to multiple industries at once and thus a huge amount of learning.
Raja’s advice for marketers:
- Learn: Dedicate time and effort to learning and staying on top of things around them
- Broaden: you should have multi-industry experiences
- Broaden: If you’re in the US, leave! Don’t restrict yourself to your surroundings.
- Broaden: Don’t stay put in marketing. Stints in sales, finance, technology, data will help you understand your role. You have to be a general manager with deep marketing expertise.
To learn more about Raja’s industry-shaping ideas, check out Quantum Marketing.
To listen to this conversation on your preferred streaming platform, click here.
Transcript
Raja: There is a difference within building a brand and brand loyalty. I'm fundamentally challenging the concept of brand loyalty itself
Eric:I'm Eric Fulwiler and this is Scratch Bringing You marketing lessons from the leading brands and brands rewriting the rule book from scratch for the world of today.
Hey everyone. My guest today is Raja Rajamannar, the chief marketing officer of MasterCard. And in my conversation with Raja, this is actually the second conversation I've had with him. He was on season one of the FinTech marketing podcast and we had a great conversation then a great conversation. Now he sits in really in many ways the center of our industry. So he has an amazing perspective on what's going on what brands are doing to be successful, what people are doing as marketers to be successful. So it was really great to dig into that. It was really great to dig into it. Some of the highlights for me, and I hope for you, you get to hear what a day in the life of a CMO of one of the biggest brands in the world actually looks like. We hear from Raja how he disagrees with the concept of brand loyalty fundamentally and what to do about that.
We also hear how he sees the marketing industry adapting or actually not adapting, at least not fast enough to changes in the cultural and technology landscape that he wrote about a ton in his recent book, quantum Marketing. And then we also hear from him his advice from marketers who want to be CMOs or on a path to being CMOs in the next five to 10 years was so much change not just to the landscape out there, but also to the role of a cmo. What are the skills? What are the experiences? What are the things you need to do differently? If you want to be on track to have that type of role in the future, please enjoy this conversation with Raja. Hey Raja, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's really good to see you again. How are you doing
Raja: Likewise, Eric. I'm doing well so far. Staying safe, always a pleasure reconnecting with you. Thank you.
Eric: Excellent. And you have been busy. I have been following along everything you're doing on LinkedIn, Instagram of course with the business, but then also your book and everything that you're doing with the WFA. So we've got a lot to talk about today. To kick things off, let's start with a question just around your kind of current interests and perspective on the marketing landscape. So what's a brand that you are obsessed with right now? And it can't be your own.
Raja: It can't be my own, so you have preempted me right there. So I would say no it's very difficult for me to say just one brand, but if I have to, I would say brands like Apple, Microsoft on the one side, which is a new technology kind of brands enabling lifestyle both in the B2B as well as B2C context or brands which are really doing brilliantly and in the entertainment space, Netflix. So I have actually a group of brands that I would closely follow and try to understand what they're up to and see what we can learn from them or learn from their mistakes if they have done any et cetera. So it's it'll be a group of brands as opposed to one thing in brand they fall.
Eric: How do you stay on top of what good looks like and who's doing interesting things? Because obviously with where you sit, your role, but also within the industry being the president of the W ffa, I'm curious if there's something that people listening can learn from you of how you stay on top of everything. Are there websites you go to? Are there people you talk to? How do you keep your pulse on what a good brand marketing looks like on an ongoing basis?
Raja: Yeah, so there are multiple things that one can do and what I do in my case, and I find it very valuable is on the one hand I subscribe to some of these magazines weeklys or daily uploads, that they have card updates that they have card. So that's one part of it, which is very, very helpful material to know what's happening in the industry. The second thing I find to get a little bit of a depth and flavor is in terms of having this industry forums and meetings them. So I try to constantly connect with my peers and other companies and see what they are up to, what they are learning, what they are seeing. I ask for references of any books or anything case study that I found particularly helpful. So I'm always constantly trying to seek information from folks that I can actually improve myself with by reading or by watching.
So that's the second thing. The third one I always find that I feel very fortunate is in my role with the W F A we formally organize meetings with peers in large and small groups and those are wonderful settings to really go around the table and then see who is doing. And this happens at least once every month, which is extremely valuable for me, not just for me, but the other participants as well in the WFA and they find tremendous value. So these are some other ways that I try to keep myself in terms of what is happening in the industry but equally I'd also look at a lot in terms of trying to learn new things even maybe the other companies are not even doing it. Where is AI headed? Where is Metaverse headed and what's happening in the world of holographic projections? What's happening in autonomous driving vehicles? Because when you understand these new technologies and what their power is and how they can affect consumers' lives and us also marketing, that's when you start seeing possibilities and you then become a leader for the rest of the pack to follow, so to speak, and stay ahead on the curve, which is not just for thought leadership, for thought leadership's sake, but also it's a business advantage that you can have for your company.
Eric: And I know that with your most recent book, which we're going to talk about setting the context and your perspective on just how fast everything is changing and how much I know you believe in and also practice what you preach of. You got to get your hands dirty, you got to be a practitioner, you got to put time aside to actually listen and learn this stuff. You can't just read the headlines. I know that that's something that we'll get into more, but I think that's going to be a really kind of rich vein for this conversation. So continuing on talking a little bit more about you, so what does a day in the life of Raja CMO of MasterCard look like right now?
Raja: See, I would say it's actually quite an interesting I know day that they typically have. It starts out in the morning, say around six o'clock, and I spend, depends on when the first meeting is. The first meeting is at seven o'clock, then I get up around four o'clock. And sometimes with the Asia particular particularly, I have to do that. So I get up in the morning and the first thing that I do is I do my yoga and after I do my yoga, I do my meditation between these two. That one is on for the physical and the other one is for the mental. That's a very, very beautiful way of grounding yourself, preparing yourself for the day and then start my meetings. And I try to make sure that there is at least a 15 minute gap between meetings to the extent that I can control so that council meeting is over.
I assimilate, digest, make my notes and just reset myself and be ready for the next wedding. So that's ideal. It doesn't always happen, but that's what I asked. And I cannot live without having timely meals. So that's one thing I always make sure that I get my food and I'm a vegan and I have turned a vegan four years back though I have been a vegetarian all my life. So during these what do you call, four years, I found tremendous value for myself in terms of consuming vegan food and both from how you feel and I don't know how much of it is psychosomatic <laugh> honestly, but it does seem to really make a difference. I really enjoy that. So I have my vegan meals and afternoon, then the exercise continues and goes on till about six 30 in the evening, at which point I'm going to take a break and I either do meditation or I also do a couple of small quick exercises.
If I've been sitting throughout the day I try to not to sit and I try to walk and take my meetings while walking and it's only very have video calls. Walking becomes a little bit of a stumbling block. Otherwise I try to either stand up and take the calls, I'll sit down and take the calls or alternate between the two. But if somebody on the other side is open to have calls, that's what I prefer because I can get my steps in and get the body moving. And then in the evening I try to clear off my emails or do some social media posts and stuff like that. And I try to get to bed while reading a book. And in the morning, one thing I must also say is when I'm going through my morning routine I listen to an audio book. So at that time I'm multitasking while I'm going about my activity in the morning. I also make sure that I am using the time effectively because there's so much to learn and there is so much you just don't have enough amount of time. You manage it smartly.
Eric: And audiobooks are such a good hack and I would add, at least for me, audiobooks on two x speed or podcasts on two x speed, it maybe takes a minute or two to get used to, but once you get used to it, it actually feels really awkward when it goes back to one x speed. But the first year, 2020, the first year of the lockdown and everything, I think I got through 150 books that year because it was just audio books, two x speed. And I kind of set a goal of let's see how much we can do, but it's amazing how much downtime there is during the day. Well maybe a little bit less with you as how it sounds, but if you can inject some curiosity, some stretching of your own perspective and just some education and inspiration, I think audiobooks are a great way to do that. So Raja, over the course of your career, as you look back on it now sitting where you are today, if you had to try to hone in on the things that matter most to getting you to where you are, and I'm guessing there might be some things based on your routine that you'll touch on, but how would you answer that question of what are the two to three things that have mattered most to getting you to where you are today?
Raja: See the two or three things I would say first and foremost would be trying to stay ahead of the curve. And that's very important because that's when your company notice takes notice of what you're doing based on the impact you're creating, then the impact you're creating by doing the latest and the greatest in the most appropriate way. Not just chasing a shiny penny but really do things which are substantial, they're grounded in commercial realities and then creating a positive momentum for your company. So that's the first thing. The second thing is to have mentors internal as well as external. No, I keep joking with my mentor group. I say that these are my board of directors and these are personal board of directors and each one is from a different field. They have been my boss in the past or there have been some professors at some colleges or whoever it is. So I have this board and they have been incredible. Sometimes when you are faced with a kind of situation at workplace as an example either to bounce off an idea or to understand which is the best way that somebody who is caught my best interest in their heart, what advice would they give me? And that's truly invaluable because these are all people like their giants in the calculation cartright world and in the world in general. I would say they're fantastic minds and they're very kind to give me time and attention. So the advice I get is many times why I did not think about it. It's pretty fascinating and I found it hugely helpful. The third thing I would say is networking. Networking is extremely critical, both internal networking as well as external networking that opens up opportunities. I have changed to multiple jobs throughout my, not as frequently as a youngster these days does, but in my own way I started with Asian paints, Unilever, their Citibank, then healthcare, then I came to MasterCard. So it's about seven companies during this 36 years timeframe. So each time there was a move, it was facilitated by some connection, some network, somebody has inequality of my work and et cetera. So networking is another thing I would say it's a hugely, hugely helpful thing and nothing to beat at the end of the day. All these will help if you are crowned the basis, the basic work is very good, it's very strong, your work is very strong, your integrity is very strong, you are dependable, you are reliable and your stuff. So I would say these would be the things that I would rate as the basic foundational ones. And the three I said at the beginning are the ones which will then give you the momentum and prop propel you into the future much more effective.
Eric: Yeah, I really agree on the networking point and whenever I'm speaking to a younger up and coming marketing audience, that's one of the things I always tell them is, look to your point, you need to be good at what you do and focus on making sure you have that. But it's always a combination of what you're capable of and who, so you can't neglect that. And yet, at least for me, when I started out, the focus was always on kind of well do your job, focus on the next step in your career and less about who you actually know. And so I think prioritizing that just as much, I'm guessing that would be you'd find a similarity in a lot of the people that have gotten to the level that you have of the intentional focus on being really, really good at what you do, but also knowing people that end up facilitating those opportunities.
I'm just curious on the mentor part, are those people say formal mentors where you've kind of decided like, Hey, I want you to be a mentor to me, or are they more informal? Because one of my things is I think that everybody, especially when they're younger, they're looking for a capital M mentor. I call it someone that's a formal relationship. Every month we have a call, you've got 30 more years of experience than may you tell me what I'm doing wrong, the things that I'm not thinking about. But actually what I've found is I have a lot of lowercase m mentors, people who I know and trust who know me and to what you said, I know they're going to tell me what they really think and not sugarcoat it. So over the course of my career, but also especially in setting up rival, I really leaned on a lot of people that weren't formal mentors but delivered that input and that value to me. And I'm curious how you think about your mentorship group.
Raja: So my mentor group, it is more formal I must say. So I meet with every one of the mentors once every month meet us in either on Zoom or a phone call or sometimes if we are at the same city we meet together, but I contact connect with every one of them every single month. That helps me phenomenally. And also they have got an expectation in their own mind as well, but there is a cadence and I agree with them up upfront saying, Hey, it'll be great if we can spend a half an hour with me once a month, that that's absolutely cool with it. Now what I find is if you make it informal, there are advantages because you can spontaneously go ahead and get things done. That's a terrific advantage. But if you are not intrinsically self-disciplined, sometimes what happens is the process drifts and you don't really touch base in like for example, there are some months there is nothing for me to discuss honestly, but then I just catch up with them, it builds relationship. And second thing is all curiously, they'll ask some weird question out of the blue, which sets off your mind think, hey, why That's something which is interesting. I was think about it kind of a thing. So I believe that it has to be largely formalised but not be sort of straight checked only to that you should be able to access anyone that you would benefit from their advice informally as well.
Eric: Hey everyone. We have partnered with attest as you know by now our research partner and we are going to be sharing our own research that we've conducted on their platform very soon. But for today's conversation with Raja, I wanted to share a stat that I thought was relevant from a US direct to consumer digest study that attest has done where they found that brand interaction on TikTok has risen from 15% to 25%, largely driven by GenZ, 45% of whom say they're connecting with brands on the platform. So a lot of the conversation with Raja today talks about how you as a marketer need to set yourself up to be constantly learning, experiencing new things, new platforms, new technology, new cultural trends as they happen. TikTok now is a mainstream marketing platform. It's a mainstream social media platform as this research from attest shows. So you really need to be out there. Hopefully this conversation with Raja helps inspire you to do that. If you have not yet run your free survey from attest head on over to askattest.com where you can do that and access 110 million consumers in 49 markets to help you remove the guesswork from your business growth.
So shifting gears a little bit and talking about your perspective and the practice of marketing in your world. So the headline of your most recent book, quantum Marketing says that almost everything about how marketing is done today, including the very notion of a brand itself, will require a complete re-imagination. And as I said before, we press record that lines up very well with our philosophy here on rival. Every business can be a challenger, every business should be trying to be a challenger. And essentially what that means is thinking about the world as if you were starting from scratch, hence the name of this podcast for the world of today and not trying to drag legacy perspectives, ideas, and models into the current world. So if you had to using that as a jumping off point, if you had the opportunity to start your rollover from scratch again today, what would you do differently?
Raja: I would say probably a couple of things. The first one is I would have spent a lot more time in technology. I never spent actually time in technology per se. I leveraged technology, interacted with technology people, but there is merit I think in understanding technology from within technology. So that's one thing I would've done. Number two, I would have also spent time in certain categories like for example, consulting where you could exposure to multiple industries at once. So it could be like a consulting or it could be a private equity or a hedge fund. So these are the folks who are looking at multiple industries at the same time. So the amount of learning that you get from this is absolutely incredible. So that's something we should have done quite some time back. If I had that foresight, then these would be the two things at the top. So multiple industry experience is very, very critical because today no industry is operating in isolation. The most successful ones operated the confluence of multiple industries. So if you know more about these, you can really connect the dots much better than everyone else and then bring it to power, bring it to life in a very powerful fashion. So I think that would be the talk behind,
Eric: I want to talk about loyalty within the context of what you just shared and also within the context of your philosophy on modern marketing that you laid out in quantum marketing and also in all the other content that you put out. So in an interview that you did with Contagious recently, you talked about how brands are so low in the hierarchy of people's lives, yet we're killing ourselves as marketers and spinning our own fantasy to say that people will be loyal to us. But at the same time, the first question I asked you, what are some brands that you're obsessed with? There clearly is some passion that people have for brands. There is some loyalty of people buying Apple and wanting to include these brands in their lives and them having a meaningful place in their lives. So I'd just be curious for you to unpack that a bit because I don't disagree particularly with the point of when you talk to marketers, brand is the most important thing, but we need to make sure that we're keeping the perspective of the consumers that we're trying to speak to in mind. But at the same time, of course there's some fundamentals to what has built successful brands that I think still apply. So I'd just be curious to maybe talk about that for a couple minutes and get your reaction to what I just said.
Raja: Yeah, absolutely. See there is a difference between building a brand and brand loyalty. I'm fundamentally challenging the concept of brand loyalty itself. So when many surveys have revealed that more than 70% of people in a relationship either married relationship or in an informal living relationship, they have admitted to cheating on their partners. And the point is, if people in their personal lives are not hardwired, it looks like for loyalty, why would we as marketers believe that people will be loyal to us as in our brands? Because frankly we rank so low in the scheme of things as far as consumers are concerned. So I would question the cha call concept of loyalty. What we mistake our mistakenly, we run these programs, loyalty programs, they're not loyalty programs. That is an attempt to get some level of stickiness. But if you misguide yourself that these are loyalty programs, then your whole approach is fundamentally wrong.
And if you look at it as how do you make this customer stick with my brand and make the next purchase also in favor of my brand, your tactics and strategy will be completely different because your perspective is approaching it right way. This is on the loyalty part of it. Now let me talk about some of the brands that I mentioned at the beginning and people, they really are there with the brands. There are multiple things, it is not loyalty even in those cases there might be a level of liking of the brand, don't mistake liking against some loyalty. I like a particular brand because they're fantastic in terms of what they provide to me, etc. Or in some cases the ecosystem might be so strong that once I'm in it shifting out of that ecosystem is absolutely impossible. So they've got a stickiness that they have generated, but that's not loyalty.
If for example, you take a competitor to that ecosystem that comes along with equally compelling stuff, I will switch in a heartbeat probably, particularly if I say there is a benefit, if there is a, what do you call it, a pricing advantage or an experience advantage or whatever. So even the brands that you like, there are brands that you like for sure, but that likeness does not necessarily translate our liking does not translate to loyalty. So that's what we have to really be carefully in our distinguishing between the two. In this day and age, you should strive for brand stickiness, you should strive for a positive brand predisposition, which means people would have a positive impression about that brand. That's very important. So brand building part of it is that you want them to associate with your brand with the right kind of attributes and characteristics and values. That's very important. All these are very important for brand image and brand equity building and that's what drives consumers'. Affinity for the brand are the liking for the brand, but that's about it. Loyalty is a different ballgame altogether and it doesn't exist as far as <inaudibl e>.
Eric: So, Within that perspective, within the world as it looks like that taking it down a level, what would you actually recommend that marketers listening do differently based on that perspective? So another way of framing it up would be if you were sitting down with a new marketing team today, or maybe you could even talk about how you're applying this perspective at MasterCard, but how would you actually recommend that for 2022 marketing strategy? What actually changes based on that?
Eric: So first I would say is that recognize the facts for what they are. Meaning when you recognize there is a problem, you'll try to solve the problem, but if you condition yourself to say, there is no problem here, what I'm doing is good, it'll not take you to the next level. So the first thing is understand the difference between loyalty and other things that you're doing under the name of loyalty. That's number one. Number two, you should be crystal clear of what you think is loyalty that is translating into business results. Understand the true drivers of those business results. If you're talking about I want the consumer to keep using my product every time that they are in that category, shopping for that particular item, or if it is a usage, they're using my product constantly or whatever it is there. Understand what are the drivers of those preferences.
Your focus should be on managing their preferences and preferences, not one and done. Every time that the consumer is taking a decision, you want to influence their decision in your favor, you want, that is what the preference management is. So you need to build platforms or programs that will drive that preference in terms of consumers towards your brand so that that's how they would their have day approach if you tuck it as a loyalty platform. Today the way we think about it, it's almost like you're entitled, consumer is loyal to me and I have run this Miles program, so they're loyal to me. No, if I look at my own situation, Eric, like I have got, because I travel quite a lot for business, I have got loyalty program, our memberships with every single airline that is out there now. So is that loyalty? No, it's whenever it's convenient and the connections are appropriate and I just take up that particular, that's what is driving my choice.
It's not that loyalty towards brand or the fact that I'm going to other options does not mean that by nature I'm not loyal to these brands or to any brands. Likewise, if you look at hotels, same thing. I've got membership with every single hotel that is I go and stay and again, I don't choose, I should live with this hotel or stay in this hotel because I'm a member of the loyalty program. No, that doesn't happen that way. So we need to ruthlessly objectively and dispassionately understand what the drivers of that stickiness are, what the drivers of that preference are, and then leverage them appropriately.
Eric: I think a lot about just building on what you said when it comes to advertising content communication, the promotion of the six Ps of marketing, I really believe that the fundamental difference between a challenger marketer or a modern approach to marketing and more of an incumbent or traditional approach is the expectation that you have the audience, have the attention of the audience you're trying to reach as opposed to you needing to earn it. And what I mean by that, I think it's similar to what you're saying, but I like how you're extrapolating it to really the whole role and the whole function of marketing. But what I mean by that is that I think you need to approach everything you do assuming that you need to earn the time that a consumer is going to spend with you, whether that's in your advertising collateral or actually in purchasing the product.
Raja: So I think there's a lot of similarities in that and a lot of this in my perspective, really comes down to strong fundamentals. All the stuff that's out there, the new technologies that are coming, the new channels that everybody can spend time on. I totally agree with everything you say about you need to get your hands dirty, you need to taste this stuff to actually see what it is. But underlying all of that, and let me know if you disagree, the fundamentals of what changes people's perception or changes their behavior, which is what marketing is trying to do at the end of the day, that hasn't really all changed that much. And so if you can come back to some of these fundamentals and have the right perspective on things and actually be customer centric is a lot of what we're talking about, but not just customer centric in the sense of I'm going to this 12 month product roadmap or this three month campaign, but actually in every touchpoint, in every decision that the customer makes putting their perspective in their need first. I think that's a lot of what I interpret at least you talking about, but let me know if I got that right.
Yeah, so I would just add an additional layer to what you have just said. If you look at the traditional classical model of marketing, and we used to think these frameworks are very fundamental. So for example, we used to call something as a purchase funnel and one of the models of purchase funnel was it starts with grabbing their attention. Once you grab their attention, you create an awareness and convert that awareness into interest. The interest then gets converted to desire, then desire. When you give the nudge translates to action and once they take the action by the product, the usage happens and the usage leads to satisfaction and then the repeat purchase happens. This used to be the standard classical model of purchase funnel. Now today that doesn't happen that way. That whole dynamic has fundamentally altered. People don't go sequentially through I A I D A S, they simply go straight to a bypassing everything For many times.
I can tell you when I'm on some social media platform, some advertisement comes in, I have never heard of the before, I haven't heard of anyone tell me that I have used this product, but based on what they have shown there, I say, oh, this looks interesting. Click finished. The entire transaction takes less than 30 seconds or one minute. And I bought it. For example, I bought an electronic notebook. I haven't heard of the name of the company before. I didn't know the concept that this is how an electronic notebook was. I was new to the category, I was new to the brand, but I made the purchase and it was not cheap, it was $400 and I just bought it. And I, I'm very conservative in terms of how I spent, I'm very careful in how I spend my money, but still this got me motivated in straightly.
I said, this exactly addresses my problem. Let me go and bite. So the point I'm trying to say is that the traditional classical models of purchase funnels have been collapsed. So that doesn't work. Advertising as we know it, I say that's again was treated to be God's truth, but it is not. People do not, you cannot market through advertising the way you have been doing in the past because people put yourself in the shoes. And I keep giving this example of myself. I'm watching some videos on say YouTube every three minutes or every five minutes there is an interruption with an ad. It's exhausting, it's it's irritating and it's annoying. And now they show two ads, not even one. So I have to suffer earlier. One, I had to suffered through two ants and now waiting for that skip now button to happen. Now when we as marketers talk about creating fantastic, seamless, frictionless experience for our consumers, what are we doing in this example that I have just given, we are introducing friction.
We are intruding it to the consumer experience and we are destroying it. Sometimes when I watch a song, the song happens to be a long said Bollywood song, five minutes long. At the end of three minutes, suddenly you stop my song for me to listen to some stupid ad that I don't care anything about and then I have to go back to listening to the rest of the song. By then you are destroyed by word. So when consumers are treated this way, what happens is they get put off. As a result, more than 600 million consumers around the world have put ad blockers on their devices. And if ad blockers will not let you access content, you're willing to pay money but not suffer through those ads and therefore you go to platforms in droves like Netflix and Amazon Prime. In fact, last year, sometime at the beginning of last year, I read that there are 200 million subscribers of Netflix alone and they spend billions and billions of hours on Netflix and that attention is coming at the cost of ad supported environment hours.
So you had to fundamentally realize that these are the kind of shifts which are happening. And we just spoke about loyalty. A trillion dollars is spent on loyalty programs every year by the entire industry. Is that something right? Fundamentally, I disagree with the fact that L exists at least to the brands. So in that scenario, I would put every single existing concept on its head and so that we have to reimagine, rethink marketing from ground up. Even the way we get consumer insights today, it's absolutely stupid. I know you ask, most of the s decisions are driven by subconscious factors, they're driven by feelings and emotions. But when you ask a consumer, why did you buy this product? What motivated you to get to this product? The consumer is giving a rational answer to what was actually a subconscious process. So by very definition, a conscious answer cannot really answer the right way. The drivers of the subconscious. So there are latest techniques available like neuro insights on neuromarketing and neuro market research. We should understand leverage those things. They're not, again a be all, end all solution, but they're a step in the right direction. So I would challenge every aspect of it and reimagine marketing and like I wrote in my book and that's a title of my book as well, is we need a new way of doing marketing across the board and that's quantum marketing.
Eric: How do you see the industry evolving in that direction? So with your view of the landscape and then also being the president of the W F A, how do you see marketers out there and brands out there adapting to this? Are people catching up to that? Are they too slow? What's your perspective on how our industry is changing to catch up to this new reality?
Raja: See, our industry has always been slow to catch up and that's the reason why, for example, in 1997 when internet was launched and when data really got democratized to the marketing field that classical traditional marketers that sat back as a result of it, the entire marketing agenda has been hijacked from them. And there are no technology led companies which are driving marketing solutions and they're dictating to marketers what can and cannot be done. The entire Silicon Valley is funded by marketing dollars. If you were to see and talk about Silicon Valley companies in the social media space, they're in the, what do you call ad exchange ads. So all these folks that are being supported completely by the advertising revenues that we marketers actually put in, but they control their agenda completely. And marketers, because they have been classically trained in areas like psychology, sociology, design, brand funnels and all these good things which are very important by themselves, but they're never caught up with the data analytics with programmatic, with the technologies that are there that like an internet based marketing is still a mystery to many classical marketers.
I'll tell you very honestly, at one of the meetings that I had with my peers, I asked, let's put a hand on our hearts and then share in the safe group. Are you all really comfortable and understand what programmatic is not? And programmatic is 20 years plus old. Now you are talking of this coming artificial intelligence. You've got augmented reality, virtual reality, holographic projections. You've got 3D printing, 5g, telecommunications, drone deliveries, autonomous cars, internet of things, wearables, blockchains, marketers are nowhere at this point in time. That's a big worry. They have to learn what is happening. They have to take the agenda back into their hands, otherwise what'll happen? They keep getting decimated. Already. Surveys have shown that 70% of the CEOs do not have confidence in their marketing departments to drive profitable growth. They are, and they have been eliminating roles of CMOs. They have been fragmenting marketing, right?
You're talking about six piece of marketing before it used to be a four piece of marketing. We are not handling most of those. Piece product is with some of the organization placement or place, which is our distributional logistics is with somewhere else. And the pricing we innovate on to, we are rarely holding onto one pillar of the four classical marketing pillars expounded by Philip Kotler, who I consider as my guru. But that the world has changed. And what happens is, plus you've got new C-suite executives coming up, right? Chief growth officer, chief customer officer, chief revenue officer. Now tell me, if you take away growth revenue and customers from CMO's job, what is left? What does the same exactly do? What does marketing do? So the point is we have to take the agenda and the reason why we have lost the agenda is because we did not keep pace with this change that's happening around us.
My biggest worry and also the biggest hope is that as we are entering the fifth paradigm of marketing, but driven by this 24 plus technologies and massive cultural shifts and at data lio, our life is going to be totally different. The classical paradigms want classical methodology strategies, structures won't work. We have to be doing quantum marketing. The good news and why I'm inspired is many of the progressive CMOs are seeing the sense behind it and they're making the wolves equally. I'm very delighted to state that I have spoken with so many professors because they are the ones who are teaching the next generation of marketers. When I speak with them more than 225 colleges around the world and some of their top colleges, they have actually reconfigured their marketing programs of how they teach marketing in their colleges as part of the M MBA programs based on the concepts I have mentioned in this quantum marketing.
So they're really looking at it. That's a big change. So at least for the future, they're going to get exposed to the right kind of things. And this is from the academy point of view, the youngsters, I think they're very curious to learn, and this is the moment if we seize, I think marketing can really make a huge difference to companies because in a world that's tech driven, the differentiation is not going to happen by products or by technology by itself. It is through creativity, it is through marketing and I think, so this is our moment to seize and I'm very excited for what the possibilities could be if you were to do that.
Eric: So for people listening who see themselves on a track to being a CMO or want to be a CMO in the next five to 10 years, because I think there's the people coming up through universities now, if that education system around marketing is changing to incorporate some of these new trends and new topics and new skill sets that people need really for people who aren't going to get, aren't going to benefit from that and are at mid or mid later stages of their career, what are the things that they should be doing now to be set up to be competitive for the role of a cmo, whatever that ends up looking like in the next five to 10 years?
Raja: Yeah, I'll give you a small list of things that they have to do, right? First and foremost, they should absolutely dedicate time and effort to learn. They have to really educate themselves quite well and stay on top of things that are happening around number one. Number two, I would say they should get multi-industry experiences. Don't stick to one company, move across industries, gain as much of knowledge as you can across industries because that's going to be very valuable. The integration of experiences across industries will be critical. Third, if you are in the us, go outside of the US as well. The globe is all ours. So don't restrict yours to some artificial political boundaries, so to speak. The world is very big. Go explore and you'll see that richness, the variety, the cultural differences, the nuances with which things can be done. It's fascinating. For example, if you look at Asia, Asia is much ahead of the United States in telecommunications or in gaming.
So innovation can happen from anywhere in the world. So be at the cutting edge. So go into these places. Fourth, don't stay only in marketing. Spend stints and sales. Spend time in areas like finance, technology, data. Thank yourselves for having me paid this kind of thing. So become a general manager with a deep marketing expertise as opposed to being a marketing specialist. The days of the marketing specialist are not going to be great. You have to be a general manager who understands marketing profoundly. You have to connect the dots between various aspects of marketing and various aspects of the business, your marketing actions, what are they driving in terms of business outcomes? That's going to be very critical and very exciting. So I would say broaden. So first, learn second, broaden across geographies, broaden across industries, broaden across functions, and of course network seek mentors and stay ahead. I think this is what my advice will be in a nutshell.
Eric: Well, I think that's a great way to wrap things up and some really good advice to leave people with. So the last thing I wanted to ask you, and I think we can, what you talked about is great advice that people can take and do a lot with, but if people could only do one thing, if they had to take one thing out of this conversation to do differently for themselves or their businesses, what is that thing for you?
Raja: Learn as much every single day, every single week. It'll really be benefiting quite a lot.
Eric: Great. All right, Raja, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. It's always great to get your thoughts on things. Hope you have a great day.
Raja: Thank you very much for having me on your show. Much appreciate and hope to do it again sometime soon. Thank you so much. Stay safe.
Eric: Cheers. Scratch is a production of Rival. We are a marketing innovation consultancy that helps businesses develop strategies and capabilities to grow faster. If you want to learn more about us, check out we are rival.com. If you want to connect with me, email me at Eric, we are rival.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, share with anyone you think might enjoy it, and please do leave us a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
