India a priority market for every brand, Mastercard no exception: Raja Rajamannar

The global payment-processing corporation, Mastercard, recently partnered with the Ministry of Tourism’s initiative Incredible India. The brand has been actively capturing the market via its experiential lifestyle program called ‘Priceless Cities’. 

This platform enables domestic and global travellers to have access to exquisite travel experiences across India. The platform is already operational across 40+ cities that are amongst the top cross-border travel corridors. 

Raja Rajamannar, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Mastercard shared, “We curate these experiences that money cannot buy and put it up on sophisticated digital platforms where the discoverability is easy.”

India is a priority country for Mastercard and hence, the brand is starting to get bigger in terms of marketing activations like cricket, travel, lifestyle experiences and more. 

When it comes to labelling this experience, the Mastercard executive believes India by virtue of its nature is varied and its diversity comes from every city as well as forests, villages and towns. “Hence, we wanted to go with Priceless India and not specific to any city like Priceless Delhi or Priceless Hyderabad, unlike other countries where we have named the experience specific to the city.”

The objective behind this lifestyle program was to promote India in various countries and attract people to come to India so they can avail this experience.

“The Government of India has been doing the same for decades with its Incredible India campaign and so is Invest India. Hence, we felt there was a confluence of motives. Under their guidance, we wanted to collaborate with them in every way we can,” Rajamannar added.

Further, Rajamnaar highlighted why brands are moving away from advertising and pedalling towards experiential marketing.

At Mastercard, the brand understood advertising has been getting more and more cluttered compared to a decade ago. On average, every user is exposed to about 3-10k messages per day. The span of attention is now less than eight seconds and is shrinking every day. So the effectiveness of advertising is declining. 

Rajamannar said, “But the need to communicate with the user is not going anywhere so we understood experiential marketing will be the prominent way of marketing in the times to come. This is why we have made the pivot over the years.” 

Moving forward, Mastercard wants the brand’s awareness to reach every tier of India. In recent years, the brand has not just focussed on tier-one cities, but efforts have been made to touch every consumer, according to the executive. 

He further shared, “Especially in tier two and three cities because the penetration is lower, the headroom to grow is much bigger but how we do it is very important. If you go to places like Warangal and Hanamkonda, you have far fewer people who speak English. They may speak Telugu or Hindi. Therefore, we create communication strategies where we can reach the consumer in Hindi and English.” 

In the times to come, the brand calls India a priority market and Rajamannar believes India has an extraordinary advantage of being extremely youthful. This is the country of tomorrow in a real sense. The opportunity to excel for a brand in the country is going up significantly across all categories. 

There is a dramatic amount of potential India has and every brand can see it. Every company is focussed on India as a priority market which is no exception for Mastercard. 

“We are going to really be getting into this market via various initiatives, one of which is ‘Priceless India’,” Rajamannar concluded.