The audience that hadn’t arrived yet.

Amex was certain the ideal Gold cardholder was the already-wealthy customer. We said the already-wealthy will find you on their own.

American Express was in a hard fight with Visa and Mastercard, and wanted its Gold Card to stand for something the other two couldn’t match. The premise they handed us was straightforward: the ideal Gold cardholder is the customer who is already wealthy.

After study, we disagreed, and that disagreement became the foundation of our recommendations. The real opportunity was an audience nobody was speaking to at that level, because it hadn’t fully surfaced yet: graduate students weeks from finishing MBAs, law degrees and medical degrees. Not wealthy yet, but certain to be.

So we built something for them rather than marketing harder at everyone else: an Amex Gold Card, a $2,000 line of credit and a checking account, bundled as one package — the first credential of a professional life, offered at the exact moment that life begins.

The package needed a bank, and the large banks turned it down; tradition wouldn’t let them release a customer to bank anywhere in the world. So we went to Coolidge Bank and Trust, sitting on the Harvard Business School campus, at the bottom of the Amex issuer rankings. Coolidge said yes to the one thing the giants refused.

Five years later
  • Coolidge ranked No. 3 in Gold cards outstanding, ahead of banks many multiples its size.
  • The Amex Gold cardholder base tripled.

The lesson: know who your customer is about to be.

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