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Mastercard on Monday signed an agreement with The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), replacing Paytm to become the title sponsor of all international cricket matches (both women and men) held on home ground. It is believed that the rights have been reassigned at the same price of Rs 3.8 crore per match. Alongside international matches, Mastercard will also sponsor domestic cricket tournaments including the Irani Trophy, Duleep Trophy, and Ranji Trophy organised by the BCCI as also all junior cricket (Under 19 and Under 23) matches held in India.

The BCCI sponsorship is the latest in line with marquee global properties that Mastercard is associated with including UEFA Champions League, the Grammys and the Cannes Films Festival. The company is also associated with the Australian and French Open tennis tournaments. In India, Mastercard signed the former Indian cricket captain MS Dhoni as its endorser four years ago.

In an exclusive conversation with Storyboard18, Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer, and president - healthcare business, Mastercard, talks about the BCCI deal, penetrating deep in India through sports and breaking the advertising clutter.

Edited excerpts.

What kind of value addition does the BCCI agreement bring to Mastercard?

People from India, more than any other country, are incredibly passionate about cricket. Mastercard’s brand strategy is all about connecting people with what they are passionate about. 

We have got 10 passion points globally that we focus on including sports, music, culinary, fashion, arts & culture, tourism, philanthropy and environment sustainability and health & well-being among others. In terms of sports, we started looking at soccer which happens to be the world’s largest, most-viewed sport so it’s not elitist. It’s easy to play, doesn’t require massive investment and everyone watches it.  

So, we are associated with COPA  America and UEFA. Now, the world’s second most-viewed sport is cricket and therefore deeply meaningful for us. While the epicentre of cricket is in India it is keenly watched even in the US, UAE and all British commonwealth countries. For us, it’s such a big deal to get into this space and be associated with the BCCI. It’s a big advantage for the brand because it gives a unique opportunity to connect in an area that people are truly passionate about.



<blockquote>It’s such a big deal to get into this space and be associated with the BCCI. It’s a big advantage for the brand because it gives a unique opportunity to connect in an area that people are truly passionate about.</blockquote>



Is Mastercard looking to increase its penetration deeper in the country through cricket?

Today, we have close to 2 billion consumers globally who own Mastercard and there are more than 3 billion Mastercards in circulation. We are truly a
mass brand and we want to be able to connect to people. Our brand positioning is about “connecting everyone through priceless possibilities”. It’s not for the rich and famous or the well-to-do, it's for everybody even those who do not have access to the financial system today, we connect with them. Therefore, cricket provides us with deep penetration across all the segments.

How do you plan to leverage this association and yet stand out amidst the cricket ad clutter in the country?

On an average, it has been estimated that a consumer gets exposed to about 3,000 – 5,000 ads every single day. That’s the extent of clutter which one cannot process and people simply switch off. So, it is important for us to stand out amidst the advertising crowd. 

We have multiple strategies and one of them is called experiential marketing. Under this we curate experiences that money cannot buy but being a Mastercard user helps you experience it. When people go through these experiences they are so delighted that they call it story making as opposed to advertising which is story-telling. These people will then narrate the experiences to their social circles whether it’s through Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp. 

That’s the kind of brand advocacy we get. If we curate these experiences at scale and in an economically affordable fashion we get a breakthrough from the advertising clutter and people start talking about it. This is a strategic bet that we had taken nine years ago across the 10 passion points that I spoke about and it is paying off. We intend to do the same in the field of cricket.

Secondly, it's about the creative as well. If there’s a creative angle we present that stands out and becomes the talk of the town then that makes a huge difference. ‘Priceless Platform’ of Mastercard has been built on essentially standing out. That’s the recipe we will follow in India as well.

Thirdly, we do 360-degree marketing as opposed to doing a few ads. We tread across all aspects of consumers in a meaningful and strategic kind of fashion. It’s the combination of these three approaches that we feel confident that will help us stand out.  



<blockquote>Sports is an area where people get connected very well with and we have got a good standing over the last several decades. We are trying to bring our international experience with sports to India as well.</blockquote>



Apart from cricket, which are the other sports you’re looking to associate with in India?

Particularly after India’s performance in the Asian Games, there has been a lot of attention to the game of badminton. We decided to support that sport as well and we are getting positive feedback both from the players and the fans. We also got into the sponsorship of the Delhi Golf Tournament. We are trying to get across multiple sports within India. The team is looking at the entire spectrum – it can be a given sport, or a sporting event covering multiple sports or it could be teams or individual ambassadors. That’s what we are evaluating. You will see us very active in the space in an interesting fashion.

Sports is an area where people get connected very well with and we have got a good standing over the last several decades. We are trying to bring our international experience with sports to India as well. 

We are also extremely culturally sensitive and understand the unique nuances, appeal and sensibilities that India has got. Our team in India is extremely strong as is in Asia so we are all coming together to produce something which is of profound meaning to the fans and has a profound impact on the brand. This is only the beginning and you will see a lot of action from us in India.

Do you think sports makes a brand more humane to the consumers?

Absolutely yes! Sports has got massive scale overall speaking. People’s passion and emotions come to the fore and they are really open to engage. We firstly humanise our brand through the medium of sports and connect to the fans. Mastercard moved from nowhere to becoming the fourth most-liked brand in the US four years back because of the connectivity that we have been establishing and humanising our brand. It can be through sports, music or philanthropy. It’s not about political correctness or pretentiousness; it's about authenticity. It’s about genuinely caring about the consumers and the fans and understanding their love for sports and then doing something meaningful in that space. It should not be just about throwing ads at the consumers.

Exclusive: Mastercard’s Raja Rajamannar on the BCCI deal,  cricket and sports marketing

How many brands do you use? How many are ones you truly care for? From these, for how many can you recall advertising? I am sure the answer would be a single digit. But there will be many more brands which you can identify, at a glance, without any other prompting. Just their design, packaging, colour, smell etc will pop them up in your memory. That is important.

We have never lived in a time so full of brands and commercial stimuli. Already in our daily lives – on TV, radio, magazines, and billboards–digital marketing has brought them to every moment of our lives. But are we building stronger brands? Many argue that this is not the case. Brand Darwinism has peaked. Why is much forgotten and only so little remembered? In an over communicated society too much is being said and not enough is being repeated. At their core, brands are about trust. You don’t demand trust, you earn it through your actions. Being the same at all times is a big factor in trustworthiness.

Via evolution, we are all descended from people who relied on short cut decision making. In the early human period, one may guesstimate that less than 10% of information required for decision making would be available. Hence ‘fight or flee’ type reflexive decisions looked out for markers and signs which were extrapolated with lifesaving consequences.

The reason successful brands are vivid in people’s minds is thanks to distinctive assets. They must remain constant. This could be one big anchoring hook or many small ones sticking on to the consumer mind like Velcro. The ‘distinctiveness’ provides a reason to recall and that is a big battle won where marketing is concerned. Distinctive assets help create and consolidate a brand image and make it more desirable and remembered positively in the market. They work as mental triggers, reminding people of a brand and all its attributes and associations.

Distinctive assets are elements that trigger the memory of a brand in the consumers’ minds without mentioning its name. They can be something you see, read, hear, touch, or feel, and immediately reminds you of a brand. The barebones definitional criteria for a distinctive asset would be anything that strengthens at least one brand element in the public’s imagination.

Think slogans, colours, logos, fonts, music, sound-effects, visual effects, scents, packaging, product shape, characters, ambassadors or celebrities.

These elements, when associated with a brand, create a picture in people’s heads. When they are reinforced enough by consistent and coherent communication, they “stick” to the memory. Thus, distinctive assets can be easily accessed among other memories with just a small trigger.

But it is not a coincidence that these elements stick to the memory. We are talking about branding work here but with a deep scientific basis.

Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, and the head of the Brain and Creativity Institute in his book, ‘Self Comes to Mind’, distinguishes between "emotions" and "feelings," stating that emotions are the unconscious, physiological responses in your body, and feelings are the mental perceptions of those physiological changes. Damasio is one of the world’s most preeminent neuroscientist whose view on emotions, consciousness, and decision-making are ground breaking. His book, Descartes' Error, shed light onto the ideas that rationality and emotions weren't opposites, but actually worked together and required each other. Damasio’s concept of Soma or a group of somatic markers is relevant to brand assets. Dr. Robert Heath writes in his book Seducing the Subconscious how "subconscious associative conditioning" is the method by which these associations get connected to brands.

When applied to brands, we see how every small encounter with a brand or even things associated with it influence our somatic marker for the brand. They emerge in our conscious minds prior to purchasing decisions. More than the conscious message, think also of shaping all the subconscious associations with the brand.

That is already enough to reach distinction. From there, it is possible to establish a deeper connection with consumers, stir their emotions, and make a difference in their lives.

People expect brands to contribute to the quality of their life and their well-being. Therefore, they are willing to create positive connections with brands. And a brand is nothing more than the set of experiences that the consumer has with it. These are associations of thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and sensations provoked by the outside world that are put together in people’s heads, forming the brand image.

Distinctive assets help to compose this experience and activate them in the memory of consumers. When hearing the set score of a brand signature tune, all past experiences are triggered in the memory and the relationship with the brand is strengthened. Distinctive assets remain there, stored in the memory. All it takes is an input – a chord from a soundtrack or the colour combination of a logo – to trigger brand recall instantly.

Distinctive assets make brands much more recognizable by the public. You don’t even need to mention its name for it to be remembered.

This recognition is important because it helps consolidate the brand image and build awareness.

It is interesting to think of distinctive assets in international marketing, especially since many of these elements work regardless of the language spoken. An image, a sound, or a character, for example, can be recognized anywhere in the world.

But this memory does not just bring that brand element to mind. With it, also comes everything that is associated with the brand, such as perceptions, opinions, and sensations that have been stored in your memory through previous experiences. Of course, this presumes a bedrock of subliminal positive experiences and associations.

It may be that distinctive assets trigger a memory of the positive feeling that using the product has already provided. But it may also be that the consumer connects it with memories that are not directly related to the brand but their life experiences - affective memories and create stronger ties with people’s emotions.

The vast majority of brands don't get to be loved. We feel slightly positively or negatively toward it, so we buy it or we don't. Research shows that we tend to narrow down our choices even in very high involvement categories like buying a car or a house. We fix a set of options and then choose from those. It's often our general gut feeling that gets those options put into the consideration set in the first place. The brand's somatic marker gives it a fighting chance to be considered. If you are in the subconscious mind, you will pop up when the decision funnels begin to get firmed up.
<blockquote>So, for most brands, rather than building a conscious feeling of "brand love”, unconscious recognition is a better bet.</blockquote>
Distinctive assets help to put these brands in a special place in your memory to be remembered when the time comes to make a purchase decision. This hopper from awareness to consideration is crucial. 

- Being unique - the element must be unique, original and differentiated, to highlight and evoke the brand and not its competitors.
- Being well-known - the element must be recognized by most of the public to be understood as a representation of the brand.

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute proposes a methodology to identify the potential of distinctive assets, which consists of the following steps:

 - An in-depth study of the brand elements: survey the brand elements to analyze, test, and measure their strength.</li>
 - Research to collect data about the consumer experience and identify how connected the brand and its elements are in their perception.
 - Interpret users’ responses and identify how to use the elements in your brand communication.

Align the distinctive assets with the essence of the brand
<blockquote>Whatever element you choose to use as your distinctive asset needs to be aligned with the essence of your brand to be coherent.</blockquote>
Keep communication consistent

Create consistent communication to consolidate distinctive assets in people’s minds. Repeat repeat repeat.

Memory is built from reinforcement and insistence, with consistency across all content and brand channels.

Bring to mind Netflix’s “ta-dum”, Tiffany’s patent colour ,The Michelin Man, Coca Cola’s Red or the Nike swoosh. Then think if you recall anything more. Do you need to?

I rest my case.

Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing - domestic &amp; IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

Simply Speaking: A brand mosaic and the little things that make it

There are brand deals and then there are deals with the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). Any brand collaborating with the BCCI is after the massive reach cricket offers and Mastercard is no different. With mobile payments and financial services company Paytm ending its seven-year association with BCCI as title sponsor and Mastercard set to take over, credit cards will be back in the limelight, experts said.

The global payments major, Mastercard, is reportedly set to replace homegrown Paytm as the title sponsor for BCCI’s international and domestic cricket matches till 2023, after Paytm reportedly requested a withdrawal from the deal.

Hindol Purkayastha, executive vice-president, Dentsu Impact, said that for Mastercard, it is about making its presence felt in the market. “I feel the need is now,” he said.

But why? According to him, the expanding digital payments industry has literally stolen any impetus brands like Mastercard had. “The pandemic brought about a flurry of new options for digital payments for consumers which has left India’s credit card market at crossroads. Also, with options of ‘Buy now, pay later’ offerings, credit card customers are surely being lured further away,” he said.

As per the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) Annual Report, during 2020-21, the number of card payment transactions carried out through credit cards and debit cards decreased by 19 percent and 20.6 percent, respectively. This resulted in a decrease in value of credit card transactions by 13.7 percent and debit card transactions by 5.9 percent during the same period.

The report further said that Prepaid Payment Instruments (PPIs) recorded contraction in volume by 7.4 percent during the year as against a growth of 15.7 percent a year ago, while the transaction value at 1.97 lakh crore was lower by 8.3 percent vis-à-vis last year.

The title sponsorship spot with BCCI can play an instrumental role in bringing back the excitement in the category, across markets.

Storyboard18 reached out to Mastercard and Paytm, and this story will be updated with their responses.

What will Mastercard do with IPL title sponsorship?

Purkayastha said it will be interesting to see how Mastercard starts using the visibility and what is the strategy and communication they bring when they get such visibility. Does it focus on business SMEs, does it address convenience or does it focus on security and reliability in a world of increasing cyber-related issues and digital frauds?

“Either way we can expect some interesting shots from Mastercard when they start this association. As for Paytm, they have surely leveraged what they needed from the BCCI. The cost of the association being in such astronomical figures, I do agree that even a year saved seems like a smart move,” he added.

In August 2019, Paytm had renewed its title sponsorship rights with BCCI for all international and domestic matches played by the Indian cricket team. The deal cost the company Rs 326.80 crore for 2019-23, which was around 60 percent costlier than what they paid for the rights for the 2015-2019 period.

From a broader industry view, executives Storyboard18 spoke to also pointed out that as the funding winter sets in and as startups head the IPO way, they are diverting resources to strengthen financials and are rationalising advertising spends.

But is it still a good move for Paytm?

Ankur Pujari, co-founder and growth lead, digital agency Hyper Connect Asia, said that giving away the title sponsor spot has been a difficult decision for Paytm as they still need constant top-of-mind awareness, not just for acquiring new customers (which would have attained sustained velocity) but also for keeping the users active and making them use the app, and most importantly, block the rise of competition like Phonepe and others.

BCCI cricket sponsorship rights - what's in it for Mastercard?

The world is going to be disrupted at an unprecedented level by a slew of new technologies and Mastercard’s Raja Rajamannar has actually counted them. “There are 24 technologies (from 3D printing to Blockchain), which are coming at us like a tsunami. Each one of these technologies is independently capable of disrupting marketing.”
Rajamannar, who is the global chief marketing and communications officer, and president - healthcare business at Mastercard, tells us how he, as a decision maker, is advancing the adoption of new technologies and building Leonardo da Vinci marketing teams to future-proof the brand and business. Read on:

Let’s talk about The Great Disruption, as you call it, this confluence of technologies that’s completely disrupting marketing. How are you, as a decision maker and global marketer, advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem? 

As marketers we have to come out of our shells and say that we have to take charge. We need to understand what these technologies are and what they can do and how we can leverage them. It all begins with education.

We need to understand what AI is. What is metaverse? What are blockchains? What are NFTs? At least to the extent of asking the right questions and when an answer is given, to make out whether it is a genuine answer or fluff.

It's very critical that marketers educate themselves. That's where the journey begins. And if you're in a leadership role as a CMO, for example, you have to make sure that there are training programmes that are put in place for your team and hiring new talent who are really good at this. So that's number two.

Number three, unlike previous technologies, the amount of investment required to dip your toes in the water for these new technologies is very small. Therefore, you should actually try to figure out, understand and subsequently, if it works, scale it or see if there is a good opportunity for scaling and leveraging. But you cannot just miss out on this and watch the world go by fast.

Also, a very important thing is you need to become close buddies with your operations and technology folks because that partnership is really going to drive the development of the tech stack or the leveraging of the tech appropriately and bring the power of marketing technology together in this brave new world of the fifth paradigm.

So how do these progressive technology-driven strategies help you fast track business and brand growth? 

One of the things that technology does is it gives you a new kind of an enablement. AI actually helps you analyze mountains of disjointed data and come to insights in an unbelievable fashion. It just happens almost in real time and that can change marketing to the most appropriate fashion, based on the context in which the consumer is. So your effectiveness will go up. Your return on your marketing investment will go up.

The second one is in terms of bringing the costs down. In Asia Pacific, for example, at Mastercard, we created a digital marketing engine and what would have earlier taken an army of marketers and about six to eight weeks to develop, now takes one individual and a few minutes to come out with a campaign that is extremely compelling. It does dynamic testing and optimization in real time. We are seeing the effectiveness and efficiency score is like eight times compared to what it is for a normal digital marketing campaign.

So what happens is that your costs are very low, your speed to market is extraordinary and your efficiencies and effectiveness as a result of which are much more powerful. This is incredibly powerful and it's changing the face of marketing completely.

The same thing with metaverse. We have been sponsoring the Grammy Awards for the last 15-16 years and what we do is we have a number of special and unique experiences for customers like walking on the red carpet, getting the best seats at the concert and then having a meet and greet with the 
artists and so on.

Now we are leveraging technology to take it into the metaverse. So we partnered with Roblox and we created these virtual Grammy experiences.
We found that the experience of the consumers was not exactly the same as in the physical world, but it was not far behind. And at a fraction of incremental dollars, we could reach 26 times more people globally. What this does is it disrupts your model of how you start looking at reaching consumers at scale, engaging them with them effectively and actually proving to yourself and your company the return on investment in a very tangible, credible fashion.

You recently launched a Music Album at the Cannes Lions. Not too long ago you launched the accessible card - Touch Card, for blind and partially sighted people, and before that there was the True Name card initiative, to support transgender and non-binary communities. How have these initiatives worked out and how do you measure their success?

What we do here, pretty maniacally, is to measure the business outcomes for every single one of our marketing actions. The True Name card we tested to death, before we actually went with it to the marketplace. We launched two years ago and today we have launched it in more than 34 countries across Europe and North America. It's one of our most profitable products, even as it is solving one of the most significant issues that this particular community faces on a day to day basis.

Now when you look at something like the Touch Card, what this does is an amazing thing. Number one, it is creating the brand as a brand that understands consumers, cares about people, and is hugely intrusive. So the brand affection scores are shooting up. As a business we have banks lining up around the world to launch this product. So that’s straightforward business growth for us. And third, it is a competitive advantage.

So many people have actually come back to me personally showing their appreciation for this product. It has got a positive ripple effect. It cascades eventually to business and brand results but most importantly, you're creating the right social impact. That to me and my whole team is hugely gratifying because it's not always about chasing the corporate objectives, but really also about leveraging the power you have, the financial resources, the network resources, the creative and communication assets. Use all those things to make a difference. You do something good in society, profits will follow.

Dialing back to the point about technologies like blockchain, metaverse, NFTs, etc. Tell me, as a leading marketer and CMO, what are the skills and key traits that you look for in young marketing talent today? 

As we look forward to all these new technologies, you need to deal with them, you need to leverage them, which means you first need to understand what they are. So the kind of talent that we should be looking for is those people who either already know these subjects and technologies or they have the aptitude and attitude to learn.

These technologies are evolving and transforming very rapidly. So the significant qualities of new talent that we bring in is learning curiosity and learning agility, and need to stay ahead of the game.

Typically, most of the people are either right-brained or left-brained. So the left-brain ones are the ones who are more into technology, data, analytics systems, and experimentation. The right brain is about intuition, creativity, aesthetics, design, psychology and so on. Very rarely we will find people who are extremely good on both these hemispheres of the brain. They are the Leonardo da Vinci kind of people. If you find those people, pay them top dollar, get them into the company. It's an investment.

Now most of the majority of the team would not be of this calibre. Which means you have people who are the traditional classical marketers who are fantastic, but give them enough training to be able to understand and speak the same language and ask the right questions. On the other hand, you have other folks who understand the technology and the data extremely deeply. But they don't see the rest of it. They need to be sensitised to aspects of psychology, emotions, design. So you actually can find people who have the sensibilities of the other sphere but the deep expertise of the primary area that they actually focus on. You need to identify this kind of talent.

And then we have got those rare Leonardo da Vinci's - over-promote them, over-reward them, keep them in the company at whatever cost.

You are one of the most influential CMOs in the world and you were recently inducted in the Forbes CMO Hall of Fame. What does it take as a CMO to make an impact today? 

First and foremost, the CMO has to be an evangelist for marketing within the company because typically there is a lot of scepticism about marketing. So the CMO has to evangelize and rally the C-suite, starting from the CEO, and earn credibility on behalf of and for the marketing function.

At the same time, the CMO has to really inspire the team to not only be extraordinarily creative, innovative, and be very insightful of the consumers’ needs, but they should also be sensitive to the business dynamics.

Marketing has to serve three big purposes. It should protect and build the brand. It should drive the business. It should drive competitive advantage for the company. If you don't do all these three, you're doing marketing for marketing’s sake.

It's a privilege to be a marketer. You really have tons of resources, skills and opportunities to serve the community and the society. So put your marketing network and resources to use for the good of the community.

And lastly, what I would say is, you set an example from the top of the house in this environment. When things are changing so much you have to invest in your team, on their learning and development programmes.

We created a Quantum Marketing Institute within the company and we have partnerships with various top universities so we can create these learning opportunities. I'm passionate about books so I said ‘hey guys, let's actually have a book club.’ So I read with them and try to understand all these new concepts and technologies, and their applications in the context of our company. I myself actually spend hours every week and weekend to really learn. So when people are talking to me I say, ‘Look, if I can do it at my stage in life and in career, you should also be able to do it.’ It's good for you, for your own advancement and for your own relevance in the future.

If you don't keep yourself up to date, you will get obsolete pretty quickly and you cannot let that happen. So set an example and inspire your team.

If you don't keep yourself up to date, you will get obsolete quickly: Mastercard’s Raja Rajamannar

MASTERCARD