Responsible credit cards

In an environment where consumers’ attitudes towards borrowing, saving and spending their money are changing, Visa International needs to keep innovating new debit and credit card propositions to keep in step. 

Engine was asked to help Visa’s marketing team develop appealing propositions in a market that’s under pressure to encourage more responsible borrowing, whilst not discouraging spending. The key was to ensure that these commercial ideas translated into valued and valuable service experiences.

Through research into international markets and products, and domestic spending behaviour, Visa had established several financial models for new credit card products. In workshops, Engine worked with Visa representatives from their member banks and with market researchers to explore how these ideas might be perceived by customers. We looked at who the target audiences were, what the features, benefits and key messages could be, and the ideal tone of voice for customer communications.

Following the workshops the financial models were crystallised around eight tentative customer propositions, each subtly different and tailored to the requirements of different member banks.

Testing the communication of new propositions in focus groups.

To ensure that development moved forward as easily as possible, we designed a framework that allowed us to work with Visa and the member banks to consolidate and refine the proposals into distinct propositions. This helped Visa to clearly discern the key insights that drive the proposition, products, audiences, features and messages behind each concept.

We then devised and visualised concepts for the above-the-line campaign, enabling us to explore and test a variety of messages and tonalities with focus groups. In addition, we provided image and word cue cards to help the focus group participants describe and map their perceptions of the propositions.

Following our work, four of the propositions are being developed for launch.