Eagles right demo for American Express Cardmember Exclusive?
In today’s The Seattle Times (www.seattletimes.com) a full page ad announced advance ticket sales available only to American Express cardmembers. This presents a great example of co-branding and affinity programs. Clearly, American Express believes that fans of the Eagles are among its prime demographic. This passes the immediate gut-check, but how does American Express really know this to be the case? How did the managers of this AmEx program gain internal approval to give up some marketing dollars in sponsorship of a rock concert? How did they make the convincing case that the ROMI (return on marketing investment) was sufficiently positive? Well, if they did it right, they had the research. Today, it’s not acceptable for sponsorship opportunities to be awarded because the CEO of the sponsoring organization was college roomies with the CMO of the company getting those sponsorship dollars. What’s demanded today is a data-based case that proves the demographic is right, the psychographics are a match, and the brand attributes of each company are giving and getting what each needs from the association. Landor Associates www.Landor.com, a fine agency I used to work for, has a large research program called Brand AssetValuator (BAV for short). This study does a great job of matching up brands via their desired attributes. Works like this. AmEx is strong on trustworthiness and prestige (both attributes help drive brand choice in the credit card market). But what if AmEx is weak on relevance to its premium card holders. And what if the Eagles concert is highly relevant to that same segment. Voila! Numbers can be crunched that make the claim that an Eagles brand association raises the relevance attribution to AmEx. And by extension this increase in relevance associates to a potential increase in brand loyalty to AmEx which in turn equates to a specific revenue amount.
The co-branding world has evolved from execs doing one another a favor. Today’s it’s all about gives and gets that can be quantitatively justified. So enjoy the concert. But know that while you may have won the pick of the seats, AmEx wins by gaining your loyalty and the Eagles win by getting lucrative sponsorship dollars and access to a motivated fan base — with cards handy to purchase those tickets.
