By Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard’s chief marketing and communications officer and chair of the judges for the WFA Global Marketer of the Year, reflects on the key issues marketers have had to address in 2021.
We have seven fantastic candidates for WFA Global Marketer of The Year. All of them have demonstrated their excellence while facing difficult conditions in the last year. When I read through the nominations, four themes stood out.
We are facing a tsunami of new technologies
Marketers no longer need to adapt to one new trend – they face tens and more at one time.
In what I call the ’fourth paradigm’ of marketing, we saw smartphones and social media change the entire industry. Succeeding in this new, ’fifth paradigm’ of marketing will require leveraging all the different technologies – both internally and in a consumer-facing way.
The marketers who manage to use and employ the right technologies – for example, using AI to provide new insights – are the most likely to win.
Consumers want to buy from purposeful brands, but they also want that purpose to be authentic. Trust is the distinguishing factor between brands that succeed with purpose and those that don’t. And if there’s no back story, consumers can quickly lose trust and start to believe that your brand isn’t serious or genuine.
Read the rest @ https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2021/12/20/mastercard-cmo-raja-rajamannar-the-trends-shaping-global-marketing-leadership
