With the advent of technology, classical marketing has almost gone obsolete, giving rise to this need for businesses to reimagine and reinvent marketing. Our guest today introduces this concept of quantum marketing, the new marketing mindset that we need to master.

Raja Rajamannar is the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer and President of Mastercard Healthcare. He's an accomplished global marketing executive with more than 25 years of experience. Some of his recent accolades include the Global Marketer of the Year Award by the World Federation of Advertisers, Top 5 World's Most Influential CMOS by Forbes Top 10, and World's Most Innovative CMOs by Business Insider.

Here are some power takeaways from today’s conversation:

Episode Highlights:

How the Role of A Marketer Has Evolved Over the Years

Until the mid-1990s, it was all about right-brain thinking, creativity, innovation, intuitiveness, outside-of-the-box thinking, and so on. But with the advent of the internet, technology entered full force into marketing on the one hand, and data analytics on the other. Suddenly, marketers found themselves to be now needing to exercise their left brains. And a lot of marketers struggled with that.

The 3rd and 4th Paradigm Shifts in Marketing

Raja explains the third paradigm as this shift in the marketing world. For instance, you find somebody who is not even a marketer but understands technology and defines a simple problem with a digital ecosystem. And then they go and create a product or a company. And the company becomes a several-hundred-billion-dollar company very quickly. Then in 2007, the shift got aggravated with the advent of the fourth paradigm of marketing wherein two technologies came: social media platforms and the launch of the iPhone. This marked the birth of easy-to-use, connected digital devices which have become pervasive everywhere. This necessitated marketers to dive in more to get their heads around these two technologies.

Losing the Marketer’s Seat at the Table

The combination of the forces in the third paradigm and the fourth paradigm resulted in marketers losing their seat at the table. As a result, many roles of CMOs are being eliminated.

If you look at Philip Kotler's classical definition of marketing as the four P's of marketing, today, many marketing departments don't have a Product. They don't have a Price. They don't have a Place which is distribution. They barely handle one pillar, which is Promotions. They only handle the thematic promotions and not the schematic promotions. And this is an existential crisis marketers face.

The Rise of Contactless Technology

Because of COVID, new habits are being formed along with the desire not to have that physical touchpoint. People are working remotely and everything has become remote. And more and more people are now leaning into e-commerce platforms. So now, everything is digitized – altering the marketing landscape dramatically.

Resources Mentioned:

Quantum Marketing: Mastering The New Marketing Mindset for Tomorrow's Consumers