Marketing effectiveness and efficiency for leading US credit card provider

In the US credit card market, the top ten providers control more than 92 percent of the market. Competition is fierce in this saturated market, and companies are challenged to acquire new customers and grow market share.

One of these leading credit card providers decided to focus on improving its marketing and advertising function — to gain both effectiveness and efficiency. Global marketing & advertising represented a combined spend of 9 percent of the company’s total revenue.

The timing was right. With the introduction of new media vehicles, such as online advertising, the marketing and advertising industry was scrambling. Many vehicles, alternatives to standard print and television, promised more accurate and dynamic metrics for marketing investment. The credit card provider wanted to sharpen their function’s ability to spend wisely and get the most return on their investment.

Challenge
The credit card provider comprises a large organization, with multiple business units, and a variety of cultures and marketing goals. In addition, marketing processes were mainly manual, from budgeting and planning to campaign execution and reporting. The focus was often on very tactical activities.

Specific challenges included:

• Lack of visibility into budgeted and actual marketing investments
• Limited campaign management and execution capabilities
• Sub-optimal efficiency and productivity
• Lengthy, manual approval processes for campaigns, briefs, budgets
• Limited tools to store, share, and edit creative content

Approach
The credit card provider engaged A.T. Kearney to work with them to improve their overall marketing and advertising function, including process and technology improvements. The main components of the engagement included:

• Baselining marketing activities, processes, and pain points
• Designing a future-state operating model, based on marketing business requirements
• Conducting request for information (RFI) process and product demo workshops, and selecting a preferred market resource management (MRM) vendor
• Finalizing a high level implementation roadmap and timeline

The approach involved key internal and external stakeholders, such as marketing, advertising, product/brand units, procurement, finance, and agencies. Participation and agreement was key to designing the model and its implementation.

Results
The team developed a robust framework for assessing spend management practices for marketing and advertising, which continues to generate meaningful insights and practical improvement ideas for the function.

Specifically, the future-state operating model resolves the marketing and advertising function's challenges — providing visibility into budgeting, spend, and campaign execution.