# Transcript: Featured Session: Why Saying Yes to the Unthinkable Works **Date:** March 14, 2026 · 10:00 PM **Session:** [Featured Session: Why Saying Yes to the Unthinkable Works](/sessions/2026-03-14/pp1148489-featured-session-why-saying-yes-to-the-unthinkable-works) ## Summary Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard's CMO, argues that marketers must abandon outdated frameworks and embrace bold, unthinkable ideas to stay relevant. Drawing from his experience transforming Mastercard's brand — from evolving the iconic 'Priceless' campaign to removing the company name from the logo — he demonstrates how questioning everything and connecting with consumers emotionally rather than logically drives real business results. He introduces his 'Quantum Marketing' philosophy, advocating for radical rethinking across advertising, market research, loyalty programs, and brand identity. ## Topics `quantum marketing` · `brand transformation` · `consumer psychology` · `experiential marketing` · `mastercard` · `advertising effectiveness` · `loyalty programs` · `inclusive design` ## Key Takeaways 1. The 'sea of sameness' in marketing is an opportunity — brands that dare to be radically different stand out and win disproportionately. 2. Consumer decisions are driven by emotions and subconscious processes, not logic — yet most market research only measures conscious, rational responses, leading to poor prediction accuracy. 3. Traditional loyalty programs don't create real loyalty; consumers participate for transactional value, not emotional attachment. Brands need preference management at the point of decision-making instead. 4. Dropping MasterCard's name from its logo — an 'unthinkable' move — helped it jump from the 87th to the 12th most valuable brand globally by sending stronger visual and emotional signals. 5. Advertising as interruption is failing — with ad blockers rising and attention spans shrinking, brands must shift to creating experiences and stories that consumers voluntarily share. ## Full Transcript As individuals, as marketers, we fall into comfort zones. Human beings are hardwired to avoid pain and seek pleasure. The pain avoidance is a much stronger motivation for us to not do things or to run away from things, and even if there is a reward at the end of the journey, still people hesitate to take those steps or make those decisions which are so contrary to whatever we have seen working. Something is working, we always say, why fix it if it's not broken? And probably the biggest problem with marketers and with business as well is very low appetite for change. If you see the amount of change that's happening, the true concept of exponential change is what we are witnessing at an unbelievable pace. Over the last three and a half decades, everything has changed absolutely dramatically. However, marketers were very slow to change. Even today, in my capacity as the president of the World Federation of Advertisers, and also as an executive committee and board member of the ANA, I have the privilege of looking at peers from across different industries, and when you talk to them, sometimes I flinch to see that these folks are practicing theories and frameworks that were formulated more than six decades ago. When they were formulated, there was no social media, there was no implementation of data analytics in business, there was no internet, and there was absolutely no artificial intelligence. The question is, when so much is changing — internet, social media, artificial intelligence, augmented reality — if we don't change, the risk of irrelevance is huge. And it is manifesting now. Many companies have done away with the role of CMO, which is scary. Many companies have pushed marketing to be a lower-order function that reports into somebody else. When I graduated with my MBA, marketing was the most desirable profession — exciting, action-filled. All the valedictorians, the best performers in MBA classes, used to go into marketing. But today, marketing is a profession ranking slightly above nursing and accounting. We have not adapted. As a result, we started getting bad practices — deceptive marketing, deceiving consumers, putting terms and conditions in print so fine and small that consumers can't read them. If you don't keep up with developments, you become obsolete. There is a whole sea of sameness. What this company does and this campaign looks like is exactly the same as every other company's campaign. Nothing stays in your mind, everything is unmemorable. And it is in this sea of sameness that you would want to break out, to stand out, because the sea of sameness is an opportunity for businesses to break ahead of the game. I'll take an example from 1997 with MasterCard. The famous 'Priceless' campaign showed a father and son — price of ticket for the match, price of soda, price of autograph — but the time spent with your son? Priceless. There are certain things in life that money can't buy, for everything else there's MasterCard. It was an instant success across countries. When I inherited this campaign, I looked at the results and found the quantitative business impact was zero. It was such a holy grail that you don't question an iconic campaign because you look like an idiot. But when I analyzed why it wasn't working, it was fascinating. What we were telling consumers was: focus on priceless moments, and MasterCard will handle the rest. We were associating ourselves with usefulness rather than with priceless. The initial novelty worked for a while — people were creating memes, creating videos — it became part of the culture. But it was doing well for the culture, not for the brand. So instead of talking about priceless moments, we put MasterCard in a position where we create priceless experiences — experiences you cannot buy but can get only through MasterCard. This was a radical decision. We moved MasterCard from being traditionally associated with priceless to creating priceless platforms like Priceless.com. I started questioning whether advertising itself was even working. When I looked at attribution models and marketing analytics, advertising was not making the kind of difference we expected. I started pulling back advertising spend and redirecting budget toward creating experiences and stories that consumers cherish and share on social media. An individual gets exposed to maybe 3,000 to 10,000 ads every single day. The attention span is shrinking — it's now estimated to be under eight seconds. How do you stand out? It's ironical that I'm a marketer who absolutely hates ads, because ads are nothing but an interruption to a wonderful experience. When you're watching YouTube and a forced ad comes on, you wait five seconds to hit skip. Marketers talk about providing seamless, frictionless, delightful experiences — but then we interrupt the consumer's experience. That's laziness. You cannot take consumers for granted. People have started using ad blockers — close to 800 million people. And hundreds of millions more are going to ad-free content like Netflix. If consumer attention spans are shrinking and consumers feel advertisements are interruptions, is traditional advertising the right strategy? What we really need to do is question everything. I looked at every single area — consumer insights, market research, focus groups — and I'm convinced we're doing a poor job. People make decisions subconsciously. Almost all market research focuses on conscious responses, and consumers give you answers they think are correct or simply don't know. Purchase decisions are driven by feelings and emotions, and the decision happens subconsciously. The correlation between what market research predicts and actual market outcomes is barely better than a coin flip. I looked at loyalty programs too. Research showed that 70% of people in relationships admitted to cheating on their partners, with an additional 15% saying they would if they wouldn't get caught. The point is: if 85% of people aren't hardwired for loyalty even when there are serious commitments and consequences, how can we as a brand expect that giving one point per dollar will make consumers loyal? What we think is loyalty is actually something completely different — consumers seek value, not loyalty. We need preference management at the point of decision-making, as opposed to running standard loyalty programs. Every single area needs rethinking — advertising, market research, pricing, loyalty, everything. That is what I call Quantum Marketing, the subject of my book published in 2021 which became a Wall Street Journal bestseller and has since been published in 14 languages, used at more than 300 universities worldwide. Consumers are not logical, they are not rational. They are driven by emotions and feelings. If you have to connect with emotions, you need a very different approach. Rory Sutherland wrote that marketing is not about logic, it is about psycho-logic. Consumers are not logical, they are psychological. One day I went to my CEO and said, let's drop our name from our logo. It is unthinkable — we have 3.6 billion consumers worldwide who have a MasterCard. But consumer research showed that while people recognized the brand, they perceived it as old, obsolete, not youthful, not aspirational. Words go to the logical cortex, whereas visuals go through emotional processing. When you have the word and the visual together, there's confusion. So we dropped the name and kept just the vibrant red and yellow circles, redesigned with the golden ratio. Today, 84% of people worldwide recognize MasterCard as a brand. We went from being the 87th most valuable brand to the 12th most valuable brand in the world. For the last seven years, we've been one of the top 20 fastest-growing brands globally, with positive associations — accessible luxury, modern, contemporary, aspirational. On small devices like phones, all brand logos get the same tiny space. Without the word MasterCard, we could expand our visual logo by 11%. And while most major brands use blue, our red and yellow stands out at the moment of truth — when consumers are making purchase decisions. Our momentum has been stronger than every competitor. Another example: I got a call suggesting MasterCard buy a men's magazine that objectified women — and shut it down. We bought the magazine and created a final issue depicting women in the most respectful, elegant, fashionable way. That last issue became the single largest-selling issue in the magazine's history. It created enormous positivity among women and opened clear business opportunities. In Poland, we became one of the top 10 most trusted brands through that initiative. A final example that started right here at SXSW: our Treasurer asked why we didn't have cards for blind people. When we researched accessibility, we found that less than 1% of blind people know Braille. The real question was: how does a blind person navigate multiple cards? How do they know which card is which, which is the front and back? With over a billion people severely sight-impaired worldwide, the need was real. We created the Touch Card — three distinctly shaped notches that help people identify cards by touch. Developed with RNIB and IDEMIA, it was a small innovation with huge impact for independence and inclusion. We completely rethought our entire marketing strategy — market research done differently, products approached differently, loyalty reimagined, experiential marketing, multi-sensory marketing. We opened 11 restaurants, launched a music accelerator, became the first brand in eSports. Constantly we question everything and challenge ourselves. If something feels comfortable, that's actually the zone you should push out of. Creativity has to translate to proper execution that gives commercial results. Marketing has to drive the brand, fuel the business, and build sustained competitive advantage. As for the growing consumer avoidance of marketing tactics — brands don't have to deceive to succeed. You can be straightforward and hugely successful. Transparency, restricting data collection, not collecting data you can't protect — these are the right approaches. Don't collect data you don't need, and if you do need it, protect it and purge it when you're done. --- *Source: stt · Language: en · Model: claude-opus-4-6* [← Back to session](/sessions/2026-03-14/pp1148489-featured-session-why-saying-yes-to-the-unthinkable-works)