MasterCard Worldwide on May 16 launched a national marketing campaign to support enhanced features of its World Elite premium credit card as the card company continues to target the affluent consumer market, which tends to have high spend on credit cards and favors cards with travel and experiential rewards.
Key features of the campaign highlight the card’s concierge service, which provides access to dinner reservations, event tickets, difficult-to-find products and services, and travel bookings; its PriceAssure service, which helps travelers track prices on airfare; and the product’s PGA Tour Player Golf Experience offering, which gives cardholders premiere access to golf facilities.
The annual fee for the card varies by issuer, ranging from $400 to free; the average annual fee is $100, MasterCard says.
MasterCard will use a combination of television, print and digital ads to promote the perks that will run through the fourth quarter, Julie Hogan, MasterCard vice president of U.S. marketing, tells PaymentsSource. Print and digital ads will appear in a variety of affluent publications that are contextually relevant to the benefits, including Golf Digest, Conde Naste Traveler, Esquire and the Wall Street Journal, she says.
The TV ads will focus on the PGA Tour Player Golf Experience, which also offers experiential rewards such as a professional caddy with the cardholder’s name on the caddy’s bib and visits to locker and dining rooms. Those ads will run through the beginning of the fourth quarter in conjunction with the PGA events, Hogan says.
MasterCard’s strategy to address the needs of affluent consumers focuses on international travelers and affluent families, which together represent about 42 million individuals in the U.S., Hogan says.
“This segment overall is important because it’s an audience that uses credit cards frequently, and they have high discretionary spending,” she says. “Their high spend potential makes them a critical segment for MasterCard.”
Analysts contend that many credit card companies are targeting the affluent market because of their high spend rates and continuous ability to pay. Clearly, travel is common theme for affluent cards in the market today, suggests Ron Shevlin, senior analyst at Boston-based Aite Group.
However, among card-reward features, travel experiences tend to rank second to cash-back offers in popularity. Those cardholders wanting travel perks tend to be a much smaller segment to target, Shevlin says.
“If you think of the top of the funnel as all cardholders, you go down the funnel to the affluent cardholders who are heavy credit card users, and then you get to the subset of affluent cardholders who are driven by travel and experiential rewards,” says Shevlin. “The percentage of that market is not that big.”
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