AmEx Wins!

In professor Pham's Marketing class, we were lucky enough to have the CMO of American Express meet with us, and during that discourse he asked us for Digital Marketing ideas. Specifically, he asked us to for potential engagement strategies for customers. Now, we skip ahead 3 months to Introduction to venturing with Murray low, where we are evaluating several technology companies. When we arrive at the group presenting GroupOn, the inevitable question about competitive insulation arises. Specifically, why doesn't AmEx make daily deals, leveraging the natural advantage they already have with our credit data and existing shops. The answer was "because they are a large company, and large companies suck at innovating." Today, we eat those words, because AmEx has released a new deals platform alongside Facebook.

Initial launch partners include big brands like H&M, Sports Authority, Dunkin' Donuts, Sheraton, Westin, Travelocity and Celebrity Cruises. This is a massive rollout, and I think it's brilliant for AmEx to engage customers on the web, a previous weakness of theirs, and for Facebook to gather even more data about its users. The deal requires that you link your Facebook account to your AmEx, which will naturally be the big questionable privacy point, but if you volunteer this data, the rest is easy sailing. The major problem with many of the daily deal sites is the outreach and training required to use the coupons, but because AmEx has an existing relationship with these shops, they can apply the discount without any additional actions from the shops.

This is the natural outcome of the daily deals fad, it is primarily a marketing tool with questionable financials, but now AmEx can fully own that it is a relationship building tool, rather than a bottom line item. I fully anticipate AmEx becoming the dominant force in online daily deals very soon, and the other credit cards should be following suit before the end of the year.