With Quantum Marketing, Mastercard's Raja Rajamannar Is Rethinking The Branding Playbook
Marketing, Rajamannar argues, now requires a reset—and this is how he came up with quantum marketing, a concept he developed in his book of the same name.
Having spent 12 years as the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of the global payments technology company Mastercard, Raja Rajamannar oversaw its transformation into one of the fastest-growing brands in the world. Now a Senior Fellow at Mastercard, Rajamannar has since distilled his experience into a stark but unavoidable conclusion: marketing, as we know it, is broken.
Rajamannar illustrates this with the example of a direct mail campaign, a tactic that marketers have long relied on, and one whose success has traditionally been measured by response rates. “When you do a direct mail campaign, you consider the campaign a success if about 0.5 percent of the people respond to you,” he notes. “And of those people who respond to you, 50 percent maybe are very relevant to you. So, that’s 0.25 percent. And we would celebrate when we have got a 0.25 percent success rate. So, I said, look, are we stupid? 99.75 percent is going to waste; yet, we are celebrating. There’s something wrong here.”
But the problem goes well beyond direct mail, Rajamannar says. From unreliable market research to outdated advertising mechanics, he points out that many of the frameworks that currently underpin modern marketing were developed in a pre-digital era—i.e. before the internet, social media, mobile technology, data analytics, etc.—which, in turn, raises fundamental questions about their relevance today.
For Rajamannar, the solution lays in rethinking marketing entirely. He likens the moment to the shift from classical to quantum physics, where a new framework emerged when the old one stopped explaining reality. Marketing, Rajamannar argues, now requires its own reset—and this is how he came up with quantum marketing, a concept he developed in his book of the same name. Built around five elements (“North Star, Heart, Technology, Brain, and Data”), Rajamannar describes quantum marketing as less a tool and more a reorientation of how marketing itself is approached—and central to this is a rethinking of how choices are made. As he put it: “Consumer decision-making is not cognitive—it is subconscious.”
In Rajamannar’s view, this principle applies regardless of context. “Whether it is B2B or B2C, human beings take decisions based on their emotions, feelings, and long-term memories,” Rajamannar says. “These are the three drivers of decision-making, and you create these positive emotions, positive feelings, and long-term memories not by being logical, and not by being factual. It is, instead, about stories. It’s about connectivity. It’s about engagement, involving all their senses, and giving them immersive experiences.” In that sense, quantum marketing, according to Rajamannar, is less about reinventing the consumer, and more about finally understanding them.
