Raja Rajamannar,  senior fellow, Mastercard, joined the company 13 years ago and was most recently chief marketing and communications officer.

In our May issue of Manifest, we caught up with him to talk about his stint with the company, as well as learnings from his career.

For Rajamannar, the defining lesson of a four-decade career came at its very beginning. Fresh out of the Indian Institute of Management Bengaluru and newly recruited to establish Asian Paints’ first formal marketing function, he was asked a simple question by the company’s managing director: “We don’t have a marketing department, but we have been the market leaders by far. So why do we need marketing as a department?”

The question, Rajamannar said, prompted a lifelong examination of marketing’s purpose and value within organisations. His subsequent research revealed that marketing was interpreted very differently across companies, often functioning as public relations, event management or a fragmented version of the discipline. 

Reflecting on his continued engagement with board roles, teaching, writing and public speaking, Rajamannar attributed his motivation to a deep passion for the profession. “When one is truly passionate about something, even if all the time is spent on it, it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like playing,” he said. 

During his tenure at the company. Rajamannar played a key role in the reinvention of Mastercard's long-running Priceless platform. While the campaign enjoyed widespread recognition, he found it had ceased to deliver meaningful business impact. "Instead of Mastercard being seen as the enabler of priceless moments, it risked being perceived as the enabler of uselessness. That’s when I felt we needed to act quickly. I moved the thinking away from that framing and repositioned Mastercard not just as someone observing or celebrating priceless experiences, but as the curator of them," he shared. 

Rajamannar also highlighted the strategic importance of sonic branding, an area he pioneered at Mastercard. He talked about developing a comprehensive sonic identity comprising a core melody, sonic signature and transaction acceptance sound for the brand.

Looking ahead, Rajamannar identified artificial intelligence as the most transformative force shaping the future of marketing. However, he cautioned against overreliance on the technology. “The key is not to ask AI to think for you. The moment one abdicates their thinking to the tool, it becomes the master, and they become the recipient. But if used correctly, it can elevate one's learning, their speed to market, and their ability to execute in a very significant way," he noted. 

Read the full interview in the May issue of Manifest, which can be purchased here.