On Friday, 15 October 2021, SEB Alumni organised another outstanding marketing workshop Quantum Marketing led by Raja Rajamannar, director of Marketing and Communications at Mastercard USA. Around 100 participants carefully listened to every word this marketing legend had to share.
The session began with a short introduction to marketing and how it has already been disrupted four or five times, with another revolution on the horizon. Currently, with more than 6 million users of ad-blockers online, advertisement is not suiting the consumer anymore and therefore the efforts of marketing players go in vain. After 36 years of working in marketing, Rajamannar confidently stated: ”Marketing as we know it is dead.”
Marketing is on the verge of revolution, it has to be re-imagined, he continued, as methodologies of marketing are not complementary to human psychology. Decision making brain—primal brain, just like the consumer behaviour, is not rational, it is psychological. And this is where quantum marketing comes in place. Until now, ads were mainly focusing only on visual and auditorial communication, yet there are five senses of human perception.
The marketing master Rajamannar showed the practical case of the quantum marketing approach they used at Mastercard. At first, they unified the logo in comparison to the previous strategies where they used many similar but different visual identities. In two years, they managed to simplify the logo with no major changes, with the main structure as we all know staying the same.
With quantum marketing, they took the consumer experience to a new level. In the name of creating their signature that would affect all five perceptional levels, they brilliantly invented their sound signature in three levels, which is interchangeable among cultures, music styles, or events. They are opening their high-level restaurants and only a few days ago they launched two new fragrances for women, using environmentally friendly sources and at the same time giving back to the community.
After this mind-blowing presentation, a debate continued with a Q&A, during which the marketing master Rajamannar stressed that all in all, marketing still has to be tastefully done, with great respect for consumer privacy. Marketers should empathise with the customers and go with the flow of consumer needs, especially today, since there is not always time to sell but also time to serve.
Author: Danica Tajčman, Efnews
