Episode 205 / Kauveri Khullaar / Mastercard Asia Pacific / Vice President Consumer Marketing & Sponsorships
Podcast: Connecting the Dots between Marketing and Business Results
For Kauveri Khullaar, Vice President Consumer Marketing & Sponsorships at Mastercard Asia Pacific, being a marketer is not just about communication and good campaigns. Marketers can drive real business outcomes, as she shows us with her example of gaming as her Shiny New Object.
While gaming is not a new marketing tool for brands, what’s different about how Mastercard used it during the pandemic and into the current time is that they’ve twisted the role of marketing into looking at business development. Rather than being content with creating ad campaigns for products that a different part of the company is designing, Kauveri told us how marketing drove the design and development of one of the brand’s results-orientated initiatives.
During the pandemic, Mastercard loyalty points became almost unusable, since people couldn’t take advantage of them to attend real-life events in sports and entertainment, among others. This led to the Mastercard loyalty programmes becoming a liability and motivated Kauveri to look into how to find a new source of income for the brand.
By brainstorming opportunities, her team discovered that they could use Mastercard’s sponsorship of eSports, particularly League of Legends, to capitalise on a huge opportunity - the $200 billion industry of gaming. Hence, gaming became her Shiny New Object as they created a conversion engine to turn consumers’ loyalty points into gaming currency.
This project highlights the opportunity for marketing departments to prove that they can do more than “simple” advertising. By driving a growth initiative, they created more income opportunities and enabled the loyalty scheme to continue to thrive in an environment where it had lost its appeal to consumers. They also helped increase the scope of partnerships for Mastercard by linking up with eSports players beyond just financial institutions.
As an example of marketing driving growth, the Mastercard gamer exchange shines a light on a new range of opportunities with gaming, the metaverse, and beyond.
Listen to Kauveri explain the evolution of the scheme and share more top marketing tips on the latest episode of the podcast here.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Kauveri Khullaar 0:00
Being in the business of marketing means really acting like you are. You're running a business. Yes, it's marketing, but it's an aid of business. And I think that's what's really important.
Tom Ollerton 1:01
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative and this is a weekly podcast where I have the mega privilege of interviewing one of marketing's industry leaders, and this week is absolutely no different. I'm on a call with Kauveri Khullaar who is vice president, consumer marketing, MasterCard, Asia Pacific. Kauveri, for anyone who doesn't know who you are or what you do. Could you give the audience a bit of background?
Kauveri Khullaar 1:42
Absolutely, Tom, and thank you for having me on this podcast. So Tom, I was an economics student. That's what I did in University back in India. I wanted to be an economist and that was not to be. So I went on to work at EMI virgin, I had just read a book by Richard Branson called losing my virginity, I wanted to meet him. And eventually, actually, I did, but it was wonderful to work for his record label for about six years, after which I went to work for Diageo. And I spent 10 years at the largest premium spirits drinks business in the world, and had quite an incredible life. And it really grounded me in marketing and fundamentals of marketing and commercials as well. And then I moved on to my current employer, MasterCard, as you said, I take care of marketing and sponsorships here. And it's for the Asia Pacific region. And my job entails well creating strong value proposition I'd say, for our partners, and for consumers to drive business goals. And just to clarify, when I talk about partners, I'm talking banks, merchants, and anyone that we can create value for and do business with. So that's me professionally, and personally. Well, I've lived in Singapore for seven years. Before that I was in India, and my formative years, I was a girl of no fixed address because my father was in the army, which made me highly adaptable to change and gave me a really enjoyable life, I have to say.
Tom Ollerton 3:10
So at the start of this call you saying that last night you had a really unusual experience with a mentalist? Can you please just remind me what that was about?
Kauveri Khullaar 3:19
Absolutely. Well, you know, this, this gentleman is a mentalist, which means he does these incredible tricks, whereby you, he makes you believe that he's reading your mind. But so for example, he asked me to think of a song. And I thought of a really cheesy song. And within three minutes, he told me what song I was thinking. And he did that with a plant and some other things as well. But the more interesting thing, the insight that I was sharing with you, Tom, that struck me, and I'm not going to wiggle away to glory on this is, it's no magic. He told me that this is just about him, reading people, not their minds, but reading people, and joining the dots really well. And I thought that was fascinating because ultimately, as marketers, and even if you're not a marketer, you could be, you know, you're an entrepreneur, you're a businessman, even if you're a finance person, that's what you're doing, you're joining the dots really well. And if you're not, then you should get down to joining the dots really well. So that was my experience. Absolutely fascinating. And I'm actually meeting him for drinks straight after this. So I will tell you more after, as well.
Tom Ollerton 4:26
Apart from drawing marketing analogies from mentalist behavior, what new belief or behavior has had the biggest impact on your work life in the last few years?
Kauveri Khullaar 4:36
You know, Tom, I was told by somebody and I think this was about four years ago, that in our jobs, we aren't exactly saving lives. So whilst it's very important to take what we do seriously and do it really well and with integrity, it's equally important that we don't romanticize the culture of perfection and exhaustion, and the two obviously are interlinked. Now I'm working on it, I wouldn't say I'm totally there. But it's helped me in a few ways. It's helped me prioritize what's important. And not everything is, as we know, and certainly not everything is important and urgent. And it's created space for me to take on new challenges. And also to reflect more, you know, to spend, well, less time doing, because when you reflect more, and you plan things, well, then you also for the most part, get them right. And even if you don't get all of it, right, you have the ability to finesse because you've thought things through. And finally, I'd say, you know, you, you also, trust your team. I mean, it's an important part of not pushing the culture of perfection, it's okay to make mistakes, to fail fast and to learn quickly. And, and trusting your team is such an important part of this overall, sort of jigsaw puzzle, right, as a leader, you trust them and you nurture them to trust themselves, too, and that can only come about if you're not constantly chasing perfection. So that's really helped me Tom, I'd say that's the one one belief that or one behavior that I'm still practicing to be honest. And it's helped me a lot.
Tom Ollerton 5:10
So let's get down to tactics here. What is the best marketing tip that you've ever been given? And the one that you share most often?
Kauveri Khullaar 6:28
It's a pretty simple one, actually, that we are in the business of marketing. And I'm underscoring business here. Because I think it's really important, no matter which industry we're in, and I worked in, in different industries, I've worked in entertainment, in FMCG. And now in payments. No matter how tenuous the link may sometimes be between marketing and the business, it is critical for marketers to think about what they can do to drive real business outcomes. And I think the environment that we're living in, and with what we're witnessing in the world around us, it's become even more important, just to connect the dots between marketing actions and business outcomes. Because it's not only going to help us prove our ROI, the return on investment to the C suite, and to increase our share of voice in the C suite. But it will also prove that dialing down marketing investments, when the going gets tough, economically speaking, will have a negative impact. So being in the business of marketing means really acting like you are, you're running a business, yes, it's marketing, but it's an aid of business. And I think that's what's really important. And that's a marketing tip I try to use and share with everyone.
Tom Ollerton 7:45
So how do you talk to the C suite in a way that makes sense to them when you're not talking about conversion, because I can imagine going to the C suite and going, hey, you know, we spent X on paid media, we converted this many new clients, every new client's worth X and have a certain LTV of y, right? And then the board go, "Oh, fantastic. Here's some money, go and do that thing." Whereas if you spend all of your money on performance, then you're neglecting the brand. But then when you start talking about brand metrics, like we might understand brand metrics between each other because we're in the marketing world, when you're talking about the business of marketing, what struggles do you have when you take that kind of progress and brand building up to a C suite who doesn't understand it in the same way that maybe we do down in the marketing department?
Kauveri Khullaar 8:29
Yeah, absolutely. I think firstly, it's about really helping them see the value even of strong brand metrics. So let's talk about brand equity. Right. And when I joined MasterCard, I remember going to one of the markets in Southeast Asia and sitting with a customer, a head of cards with a very significant bank. Who said to me, Well, your brand is not salient enough? I don't see it enough. Tell me what is what do people think about your brand, as compared to your competitor? No doubt we were starting out. It was one of the smaller markets. And his point was that if you're not strong enough, as far as brand resonance is concerned, then what chance do we have of a partnership that would involve co creating a product that consumers would actually lap up? And would use? And I think it was that experience that was not that challenging in that moment. That also really revealing to me the impact of marketing on business. And it was important to come back to the C suite and socialize that point, share that with the C suite and say, we need to do a few things. Because it is important for our brand, we're a payments technology brand. Yes. And it's the issue of brand that really carries the weight of driving acquisition and usage. Let's say I'm talking about credit card products here. Credit or debit, or prepaid for that matter. But this is a customer, a partner telling us, it's important for the brand to be strong in order for the consumer, the end user to have confidence in the brand. I think it's conversations like those that creep that gives me in my early, early years, like the early phase of my life at MasterCard, confidence in just how significant and how important marketing can be to the business.
Kauveri Khullaar 10:25
But besides that, Tom, I'd say it's also really thinking about unconventional ways in which marketing can add value. Because the one thing that I heard a lot, and again, in the formative years as a marketer, was "marketing is a cost center." But I think sometimes it takes a little bit of what Steve Jobs said, when in reality, you really challenge the norm. And you say, what can I do differently? How can marketing become a revenue center? And I know it's not always possible, but sometimes the stars to align. And when I talk about the shiny new object, I can give you an example of that. So maybe I'll save it for that. But is there a way that you can influence product? Is there a way that you can partner another function and take what they're doing to your partners, or to the end user in an effective way? Because what good is a product if you cannot communicate it effectively? Right? And that's the job of marketing. So it's those conversations that really help but really, it's a learning journey. I don't think there's any definitive response to it. It depends on the industry you're in. I think what's most important is to sit back and say, I'm taking off my marketer's hat. I'm not just a marketer, I am an entrepreneur, I'm a business person. Now, I have so much budget, and I need to drive business goals. The link here is tenuous. How far can I go? It may not be all the way down from consideration to conversion in the funnel. But how far and how deep can I go to have an impact? I think that is a good starting point. And from there, you can get to places where the linkage becomes more and more tangible.
Tom Ollerton 12:14
This episode of the shiny new object podcast is brought to you in partnership with MADfest, whether it's live in London or streamed online to the global marketing community, you can always expect the distinctive and daring blend of fast paced content startup innovation pitches and unconventional entertainment from MADfest events, you'll find me causing trouble on stage recording live versions of this podcast and sharing a beer with the nicest and most influential people in marketing, check it out at www.madfestlondon.com.
Tom Ollerton 12:44
I'd love to stay on this topic for the rest of the podcast but we can't, I would not be delivering on the promise of the product itself. So we are going to talk about your shiny new object now, which is gaming, and I've been a bit late on you. Yeah, because that's not a shiny new object. But I've got a feeling you're going to talk about it in the context of it being a shiny new object. So why is gaming your shiny new object today?
Kauveri Khullaar 13:12
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm gonna tell you a bit of a story and talk about our journey, you know, in gaming at MasterCard. So I'm going to go back to 2020, Tom, which is when I joined the regional function, I was working in Southeast Asia, and then I joined Asia Pacific to take care of marketing and sponsorships, the pandemic had already hit. This was June 20, May or June 2020. And I looked at the portfolio of sponsorships that we have, and it's a very, very significant portfolio across 10 Passion points. So there is sport, there is music, there's food, etc, etc. And it was all about the way we leverage this portfolio is by really helping people experience the power of the sponsorships. So imagine going to UEFA Champions League, Australian Open, walking the red carpet and the Grammy Awards, so on and so forth. But what you're going to do when people can't go anywhere, you can't take people to these events. And the only organically digital sponsorship we had was a partnership with Riot, a multi year partnership that we had the League of Legends, we were the first global sponsors of the most viewed and played e-sport in the world at that point in time called the League of Legends. So we decided to deep dive into it and say, What was the opportunity not only within eSports alone, which is competitive gaming, but the entire gaming industry. And we found when we dug into the data, that it's a $200 billion industry. So that was an opportunity. We wanted more, we wanted more than just the eSports share of the pie. On the other hand, there was a challenge of course that was induced by the pandemic, people were not going anywhere. And they were not using their miles, their loyalty points, right, the reward points that they were gaining on whichever loyalty platforms they may be using, which meant that the liability on the books of the loyalty platforms was increasing. So think of a bank, and you've got 100,000 points on your card, and you're not able to use those bonus points anywhere because you're not flying, you're not staying in hotels, you're not going for experiences where you would typically burn those points. We juxtapose the challenge and the opportunity next to each other, and said, What can we do about this. And after a few months of brainstorming, we came up with an idea to create a conversion engine. And the conversion engine would convert loyalty points to gaming currency, across 1000s of gaming titles.
Kauveri Khullaar 15:58
Well, it sounds really simple. And it really is very, very simple, right? You're essentially just creating yet another reward category, but one that was really hot, and one that had received a filling all thanks to the pandemic, because that's what people were doing. And this gaming product is called the MasterCard gamer exchange, it is something that we have created right here in Singapore. But it can be deployed in 75 countries around the world. It is in beta mode at the moment. So we're going to go live soon, fingers crossed. We are testing and, and making sure that the UX is completely refined before we go live. But I think to me, this is this is an example of what marketing can do when we a little bit go against the grain in terms of hey, listen, we're not just about communication and messaging and campaigns, yes, that's important. It's an important part of what we do. But what is it that we can do differently? How can we drive revenue, and as product has helped us drive many partnerships with players beyond just financial institutions, so it has increased the scope of partnerships for us. And it has, I would like to believe at least increase our share of voice in the C suite. The results are yet to be seen. We have to stay humble, in terms of, you know, waiting and watching and really hoping that it does well. And I believe it will.
Tom Ollerton 17:31
So what was the hardest thing in getting this all set up?
Kauveri Khullaar 17:35
Oh, wow, it was it was just the cross functional alignment that was needed. Because you may have a fantastic idea. But you need champions who will help get this idea off the ground, it took us almost a year and a half to really get everyone together to align to this product, align with this idea, the investment that it needed, and to find the champions who would also help socialize this to external partners, and help it go live. So I think all of it was challenging, but also tremendously enriching. For me it was a crash course in just cross functional alignment, understanding what all the functions do, how they can support, the potential challenges and questions that may come up, how I may be able to answer those questions alongside the team, there was a huge amount of teamwork. And it was, as I said, it was challenging, but wonderful at the same time.
Tom Ollerton 18:31
And if you're going to do it again, what would you do differently?
Kauveri Khullaar 18:33
Hmm, I would be less ambitious about time to market. I think, Well, soon after we created the product we thought it was ready to go live in a few weeks' time. And it's taken, it's taken months. Because it's also taken a lot of sort of legal processes and data privacy processes. Of course, everything that we do has to be absolutely transparent, absolutely kosher. So I would be a little bit less ambitious about that and more realistic, which would put less pressure on my team and on myself. I think that is one thing I would do differently.
Tom Ollerton 19:16
What it sounds like to me, and I'm being skeptical here, so excuse my tone. But it seems like when you went into lockdown, you didn't really have a choice but to do this. And I think it's fantastic that you have and I like the way you use the word humble. And it might be a success. I don't this point seaway wouldn't be but it seems to me that my past as an innovation person there's either like innovation that you can run towards, like a new thing that you can leap on, or you're sort of on a burning platform and you have to innovate your way off it. And it seems like to me that you were in a terrible situation where all of your sponsorships were real life events and people weren't going anywhere, weren't spending any of those points, but yet you had this like jewel in the crown, which was this this league of legends partnership. So how much of this innovation do you think was successful because you had to versus the fact that you wanted to?
Kauveri Khullaar 20:04
Yeah, that's a great question Tom. And I think, let me give you an example of what we could have continued doing. We did not, we could have done without innovating. Let me put it that way, right. So we could have kept cruising, and we could have simply done virtual experiences, which we have started to do. So the one thing we did when we had to pivot away from physical experiences was we took them, we just put them onto a virtual platform called crisis.com. And worked very closely with the global function, to do things such as a zoom call with a football coach, you know, virtual experiences with world famous chefs coming together, with tennis players, you know, and the tennis player would say, as we did one with Naomi Osaka, and she cooked a really incredible meal with with a world class chef, we could have continued doing that, the quantum of experiences would have gone up, we would have had a really good pipeline of experiences. I think within esport, we could have done more with League of Legends, again, purely on the digital platform. So we could have done more of the same. That was eminently possible. And I would say it was easier to do. It was a path of least resistance if I had to call it that. But we decided to create a product, like I said, not remain within the conventional realms of marketing, but go beyond it and say, how do we create something from scratch, not something marketing is expected to do and take it to the world. This is about giving people access to 3000 Gaming titles by simply burning the reward points, which otherwise they were not burning. So that's how I would answer your question. It was interesting. And I think it helped that all the stars aligned, right, the ideation happened, the insights were found, we interrogated the data that we sought to hit upon the insights and and off we went to create the product.
Tom Ollerton 22:11
So unfortunately, we are at the end of the podcast now. And I'd just like to congratulate you on being so open about your work. It's quite often with guests on the podcast, and rightly so, they can't talk about work for good reasons. But you've given us a really honest inside view of a new product that you haven't even proved worked or not yet. And so I absolutely congratulate you on your transparency there. And I wish you all the best of success for it. But if someone else wanted to talk to you about gaming, or about any of the topics that we've covered today, how would you like them to get in touch with you? And what makes a brilliant outreach message to you that you will actually reply to?
Kauveri Khullaar 22:51
Oh, hit me up on LinkedIn anytime. I would love to interact with you. Yes, there are so many messages on LinkedIn. So it's nice when someone adds a little note and tells me what they'd like to talk about and keeps it really brief and pithy. So I think that would be that would be good enough to get my attention. But I'd love to talk to people.
Tom Ollerton 23:11
Well, thank you so much for your time.
Kauveri Khullaar 23:13
Thank you, Tom. It was such a pleasure talking to you.
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