MasterCard Transformed

A Priceless Image

As part of IESE’s Keynote Speaker Series, MasterCard President and CEO, Robert Selander, explained how the credit card has gone from “tired” to “talked about” by advertising feel-good family values.

“There are some things money can't buy,” begins MasterCard’s signature slogan. For CEO Robert Selander, the top brand awareness enjoyed by his payments company is one of those things.

Annual advertising budget: $360 billion. Revitalizing the MasterCard brand and elevating its position in the global payments industry: priceless.

With its familiar, award-winning catchphrase, MasterCard – once considered the utilitarian “other” card on the market – has been turned into a top global player. This transformation, from “tired” to “talked about,” was detailed by MasterCard President and CEO, Robert Selander, when he spoke recently as part of IESE’s Keynote Speaker Series in Barcelona.

Shortly after his appointment in 1997, Selander realized that MasterCard urgently needed a total repositioning, having suffered a decade of market share decline. Lacking the cachet of Visa and American Express, MasterCard's brand image was “fragmented, ordinary and generic,” he said. A fresh approach was required to “capture the hearts, minds and wallets of customers,” Selander told a packed auditorium of IESE MBA students.

Selander explained, “We adopted a simple, straightforward strategy, which can be summarized with three words: focus on customers as central to everything we do; strengthen our core services; and differentiate ourselves through individualized services and solutions.”

In seeking to differentiate MasterCard from the “conspicuous consumption and materialistic” image cultivated through the commercials of rivals Visa and American Express, Selander said MasterCard opted to focus on “everyday purchases” predicated on the idea that “it’s not individual purchases that are important but individual experiences.” So, instead of showing dukes and jetsetters flashing their plastic for the camera, MasterCard’s premier “priceless” advertisement featured a father and son bonding at a baseball game.

Such feel-good family values tugged at the heartstrings, implying that the best things in life are free. Simultaneously, they fuelled the card company’s conversion into a multi-billion dollar, SEC-registered, private-share corporation. The 645 million MasterCards now in circulation are accepted in 24 million locations worldwide, making MasterCard “used in more countries than you can buy Coca-Cola,” boasted Selander. “The level of sophistication is now such that we can measure how many dollars spent on advertising translates to dollars in customer spending.”

While the scene of each advertisement may change (football in Brazil, cricket in India, hockey in Canada), the fundamental message remains the same in all 99 countries and 47 languages where the “priceless” ads appear. In weighing to what degree the international campaign would need to be adjusted to take account of local customs and tastes, Selander said, “We presumed that we are more the same than different; that the things we have in common are greater than those that separate us. Our adverts cut across cultures, geography and languages.”

This universally-appealing approach has proved so successful that Selander said “all new promotions have to work with `priceless´ rather than the other way around. And as long as we continue to get positive feedback from the marketplace, we plan to keep the `priceless´ campaign running for a few more years. We think this has `legs´.”

IESE Dean Jordi Canals praised Selander’s “fantastic global strategy, which combines technology with marketing and innovation.” Selander welcomed the opportunity, as part of the Keynote Speaker Series, to offer IESE MBAs his own professional insights into turning around a top global brand, perhaps hither to known by MBA students only as “the card they used to buy books, DVDs, computers and clothes.