The global CMO of the Mastercard, Raja Rajamannar spoke in an online campaign that connected the audience on Tuesday evening. Rajamannar revealed that what paves the way for them to shift the world under its feet was, their established brand purposes and their healthy dose of advanced crisis game planning. He said that if we stick with the customers during their time of vulnerability when the tide turns, they will stick with us. Because they would always remember those who helped them at the time of crisis.
Along with that he rightly said, two and half years back they formed a risk management function within the marketing which is very unusual, and also they developed contingency plans for a whole range of scenarios, such as financial crisis or data- privacy disasters. But they had no clue of either COVID 19 or the extent of the devastation, both economically and health-wise, as it has been creating around the whole world. But the exciting fact is, they had the risk- management function already in place, and all the building blocks were there, so they could easily recover from the pandemic.
He mentioned, formally they spend a lot of time to figuring out what the purpose of the company would be and how would it manifest into the brand, the brand positioning, the brand values, the brand imagery, etc. all of these things, they have done quite some time back. And also he mentioned that, when the crisis hit, the marketer must think about how the application of strategic shifts in the changing environment rather than adopting new or avoiding existing ones.
According to the research report, they understood that the homebound consumers were open to something that could break the monotony, but usual in-person experiences with brand ambassadors were out of the question. Actually what they did was, they quickly pivoted from physical experiences and they decided to deliver digitally without any cost. They did this not for making money instead to help the consumers and make them feel good.
