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. The audience nobody was speaking to was the one about to arrive.

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. The disagreement became the foundation of our going forward recommendations. The already-wealthy, we contended, will find the Amex Gold card on their own. The real opportunity was with an audience nobody was speaking to at that level because it hadn’t fully surfaced yet: graduate students weeks from graduating with MBAs, law degrees, and medical degrees. Not wealthy … yet, but certain to be said the averages.

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 a single package of financial benefits, i.e., the first credential of a professional life, offered at the exact moment that professional life is about to begin.

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 a local banking partner instead: 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. Over five years the Amex Gold cardholder base tripled.

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

We find the breaks. Fix them. Then move on.