‘If You Don't Understand Technology or Data, You'll Become Obsolete'

Raja Rajamannar, CMO at Mastercard, talks about his book Quantum Marketing, and how marketers can stay relevant in the future

- POOJA SARKAR

Q According to recent studies, 80 percent of CEOs says they have no confidence in their marketing team, while 70 percent say their marketing teams don't have business credibility or the ability to generate growth. Why is marketing in such a crisis?

When so many CEOs say they have no confidence in their marketing departments, or in their CMOs, it’s a huge issue. It is also resulting in a lot of action being taken by CEOs and companies. A number of CMO roles have been eliminated across companies, and these are blue-chip, consumer companies like Johnson & Johnson or Hershey’s.

Number two, many companies have started fragmenting marketing and putting the different parts in areas outside of marketing. That's another problem. If you take revenue growth and customers away from marketing, what is left? So there is an existential crisis.

By the mid-1990s, with the advent of the internet and data analytics, marketers felt completely out of depth. A whole new breed of people came in and took the agenda away from them. As a marketer, you cannot look like a deer caught in the headlights when asked a tough business or finance question. And that’s what has been happening. And CEOs started losing confidence in the CMOs.

Q How are marketers dealing with the challenges of ad blockers, subscription-only models and customers shunning any form of advertising?