Credit Card Company
This global credit card company approached us to focus on developing a company-wide value proposition for their merchant base across Europe.
The issue:
Declining sales and profits as merchants were:
- surcharging customers
- often refusing card usage
- deactivating their card accounts
- not wanting to become a customer
Individual countries across Europe had developed their own value proposition for their own markets that had had mixed success and the European President now wanted a European-wide value proposition.
What we did:
Using our step-by-step, rational and psychology-based Value Proposition BuilderTM approach we started with a pilot project covering two countries to develop hypotheses.
The findings from these two countries were then tested further across an additional seven countries.
In total over 300 in-depth qualitative merchant interviews and merchant/customer observations were conducted by native country experienced researchers.
We analysed and then developed a framework covering the market context, the in-depth merchant value experience, the product and service offerings, the benefits, the competitors & alternatives, customer service, pricing and the current messaging to merchants.
Recommendations for phasing out some current offerings and developing and introducing new offerings and pricing including detailing the new offerings.
Developed a value proposition framework with three core pillars and a prioritised, phased plan for implementation across all the countries.
Handed over and worked with the client’s:
- Pricing team to create a choice of new pricing packages
- Customer service team for internal communication and adoption of new working practices
- Global marketing and advertising agency to translate the value proposition work into new brand positioning and key communication messages
The impact on our client:
The realisation and understanding that merchants are influenced by emotional and social drivers and not purely rational ones based on price.
A new relational approach to communicating with merchants.
Client teams have a model to enable them to be able to predict likely future merchant behaviour based on specific interventions.
Card re-activation has increased.
Merchants are transacting more.
Merchants are not refusing to accept the card.
More merchants wanting to become customers.
Sales and profits are increasing.
Marketing, sales, customer service and pricing teams now have a single framework to work to across Europe giving them absolute clarity about current operational practices and strategic direction.