Raja Rajamannar on the Sound of Mastercard

Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer at Mastercard, boasts over four decades of experience in marketing. In 2019, he led the launch of Mastercard’s sonic identity, including the three-second sound bite that has since become one of the most recognisable audio logos in the world.

Consistently recognised as the world’s best audio brand, Mastercard’s sonic strategy is described as the gold standard in the sonic branding world. The brand’s dominance in the audio space is a testament to Raja’s belief in the power of music and sound to transform and move brands forward towards untapped markets and audiences.

Raja’s approach is thoughtful and intentional. Mastercard’s sonic brand speaks a universal language, heard around the world and built from two years of research. Whilst collaborations with artists in individual countries – such as Kailash Kher in India – have been unexpected yet well-received, helping to establish the brand’s place in music in multiple different regions,

Speaking with Music and Strategy’s Co-founder and President, James Alvich, and partner and EP, Gabe McDonough, Raja discusses his early realisation of the intersection of music and marketing, crafting a sonic brand that stands out amidst a population that’s learnt to ignore, and why he believes quantum marketing is the future.

^{​Above: Music and Strategy's James Alvich and Gabe McDonough}

MAS> Let’s start with your own relationship with music. What’s your first musical memory, and do you think it stuck with you through the years?

Raja> I’ve been exposed to music since my early childhood. My mom used to sing classical Indian music, my dad used to play an Indian percussion instrument called Tabla, my elder sister plays a string instrument called Veena, and my second sister – she's also older than me – is a very accomplished classical music singer, and she used to perform on the radio.

So I’ve been surrounded by people who knew, enjoyed and loved music, and I actually got trained for some time in classical Carnatic music – that's what it's called in South India – also on the string instrument, Veena. But then very quickly after that, my studies had overtaken everything else, and I let it go, but it has stayed with me in terms of my appreciation of music, and that's one of my deepest passion points.

MAS> Mastercard is now widely recognised as a top audio brand. What sparked the decision to invest so heavily in sonic branding?

Raja> It’s been a very interesting journey. Firstly, when I looked at the entire field of marketing, I saw it was getting very crowded and cluttered. At the same time, the span of human attention is shrinking to less than eight seconds – which is less than that of a goldfish.

The average individual gets exposed to between 3000 - 10,000 commercials on a daily basis, which is impossible to process, and the brain learns to tune itself out from all these messages. So even if you are screaming with your ads, they're falling on deaf ears, so to speak – people are ignoring it. So marketing is becoming more expensive and advertising is becoming more expensive.

That's when I also noticed another trend. It was at the time that voice activated devices and interfaces started coming about, whether it is Alexa, Google Home or similar, and at the same time podcasts had become more popular.

So I said, we need to look not just at the senses of audio-visual in combination, but we should look at each and every sense individually – sight, sound, taste, touch and smell – and develop concepts for each one of these and also at an integrated level, which are fully immersive and draw upon as many of these five senses as possible.

MAS> From there, how did you build a sonic identity, and what role does it play in your broader brand strategy?

Raja> I thought, when I look at a Mastercard logo, I know it is Mastercard. So, what is the equivalent of the Mastercard logo in the world of sound?

That’s where it began. From there, it took me two years of intense research, working with musicians, musicologists, record labels, agencies and artists. It was crazy exercise, and I had to do it globally, because it has to be universal. It has to appeal in every country, to every genre of music, and every context, whether it is a football match with high energy or it is in a romantic evening dinner, it has to transcend all these situations.

And so we had to come up with, ‘what are the principles of a good audio brand?’. We started there, and then said, okay, it has to be adaptable. It has to be memorable. It has to be versatile, and it has to not dominate a situation, but it should be subordinate to a situation, so that the sound itself doesn't become the message, but the sound enhances the message and so on.

We had all that, and that brought in a 10 layer architecture for our sonic brand. The first layer was the melody. It's a 30 second melody which has got all the characteristics that we wanted. Then there’s the second layer – a subset of the first three seconds of the melody – which is the ‘sonic signature’ played at the end of every video or advertisement, where you hear the sound of Mastercard. That three second subset is a very interesting component, but it's only a component, it's not a system in itself.

For the third layer we knew that we are uniquely present at the point of sale. So why don't we actually create the sound of when the transaction goes through successfully when I pay with my Mastercard? That sound today is available at close to 1.7 billion points of sale around the world today.

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MAS> And within the same time frame as building that sonic brand, you’ve also fostered a lot of artist partnerships too. Between Camila Cabello, Jennifer Hudson and Lady Gaga at the 2025 Grammys – how do these collaborations help to retain your place as the top audio brand?

Raja> We’ve worked with a lot of major artists over the years, for example, we’ve just signed The Jonas Brothers for Stand Up To Cancer. Primarily, what a partnership with an artist does for us is give us a little bit more credibility, and it will give us a lot more visibility.

For us, when we look at the partnerships with, say, for example, Camila Cabello, she reached a very different set of audiences – the younger audiences – brilliantly. Whereas somebody like Lady Gaga reaches a different audience, again, brilliantly and at scale. So through these partnerships we try to demonstrate to the world that Mastercard is serious about its passion for music.

We are very thoughtful about this, and it doesn’t just operate at a global level either. If you look at a country like India, we recently signed up with a guy called Kailash Kher. Now, Kailash is a very unique artist – his singing is a little unconventional and his voice and style is very unique. He is half Sufi in terms of his singing style, and half Folk, it's a very unusual mix and he has got many big hits in India.

Nobody would have expected that if Mastercard were to enter into music sponsorships in India, that we would go with somebody like Kailash Kher. It is totally unexpected, but it is working so well for us. He created a song for us that leveraged a Mastercard brand for the tourism department of India.

It's not seen as a corporate anthem, but seen as a popular song. And what happens is that it increases the recognition of our brand melody, therefore the brand identity gets reinforced, and it gives us fantastic reach, and we are the culture, so it's been working fantastically for us.

^{Above, The 'Abracadabra Fan Edit'}

MAS> Have you seen consumer behaviour change through these efforts and the different cultural touch points that you interact with?

Raja> Yes definitely. We got a ton of social media publicity that’s very positive and applauding Mastercard, and there were also a lot of comments saying, 'Oh, it's so great to see an Indian folk singer getting recognition and partnership with a global brand.’

There's pride, and there is admiration for Mastercard and pride for this artist and what he has accomplished. So it's the best of all the world, so to speak. It really was very positive. Now, directly as a result of it, we have been able to curate some priceless experiences around his performances, that we can package-up and give to our partners who will market them to their clients, acting as a new product in itself.

MAS> You obviously see music as a branding tool and an emotional driver. But do you see it as both? Do you see it coming together in a lot of the other ways that you market?

Raja> Absolutely. There are multiple things that we are doing right in the world of music. Firstly, we have signed up with Live Nation in Europe.Mastercard card holders get access to the tickets for the pre-sale before the general public gets it – Mastercard customers are benefiting, it's part of a value proposition. We have things like best seats in the house, meet and greets with artists and signed merchandise and memorabilia. It’s been so successful for us that we’ve expanded the partnership into the United States, where we’re now sponsoring three venues and eight festivals with Live Nation, and we have a similar partnership in place with Eva Live in India.

We also created something called the Mastercard Music Accelerator competition. In season one of the competition, we selected five highly talented youngsters, and we provided them with mentoring and coaching by subject matter experts.

The first season of this competition was in 2023, we thought that we’d have around 3000 artists following along, but we ended up getting 135,000 people. We’ve followed up with seasons two and three, and it’s an area which gives us a deeper presence in the world of music.

We have also played with technology. Using artificial intelligence, we created a tool called Mastercard Sonic Studio. Imagine I am a marketer in the Philippines, for example, and I want to create music for an advertisement or video that I'm making. Instead of going to my agency and asking them to create something that’s brand compliant, these marketers now have access to this gen AI music studio.

They can select an age group, and specify which genre and style they’re looking for, and it creates 20 tracks instantly, from which they can pick and choose which track they want to use. The music can then be modified to fit the exact length of the video or any other requirements. This Design Studio is one of the ways we’re getting deeper and deeper into this space.

MAS> You’ve also written a book on quantum marketing, so I wanted to ask about how you feel that music fits into the evolution of quantum marketing?

Raja> Quantum marketing: the concept is simple. Classical marketing as we know it, the theories and the frameworks and the concepts were all formulated 60 or 70 years ago, at a time when there was no internet, social media, or mobile – none of these existed when marketing concepts were being formulated 60-70 years ago.

There is a profound need for us to reinvent and reimagine marketing, given all the dramatic changes that have happened which changed our lives and behaviour as a result – marketing has to reflect that.

A way of doing marketing in this new era is what I call ‘quantum marketing’. It has multiple concepts. One of those concepts is called multi-sensory marketing: marketing, leveraging all the five senses, and sound is one of the most important senses.

And sound is not just making noise or sound, but there is a science behind that sound. Deploying music, deploying actual sounds, using the right voices which have got the right impact – there are a whole bunch of things that we have studied around sound, music and voice. The culmination of that is one significant part of multi-sensory marketing.

Multi-sensory marketing in conjunction with neuro marketing, behavioural economics, colour psychology, science of anonymity – there are whole other fields – the sum total of that is what quantum marketing is about.

MAS> And we'll end it on a fun one. What are you listening to right now? Any personal favourites, or unexpected picks you'd recommend?

Raja> I have a paid subscription on Spotify. And on it, I keep creating my playlists, and I'm constantly listening to them – I really love them. The latest song that I have been listening to is called ‘The Door’ by Teddy Swims – it’s what I was listening to right before this chat!