American Express Global Commercial Services

Working with my team from Sullivan, I led a team that developed a customer journey, positioning, and campaign to better connect with their large-scale, global clients.  Amex faced rising competition from new fintechs in the space, like Brex and Divvy, who tout agility and new technology. Rather than elevating their existing communications, we guided the client to start from the beginning (the customer) to understand what communications were even needed and how to best communicate them. We then extended the campaign to the determined activations, including sales decks, sales sheets, email campaigns, banners, etc.

We found that deciding on a company to manage the financials of your corporation is a huge decision with many people involved. Switching takes a long time and a lot of time; some people just don't switch. A social post alone isn’t going to move the decision-making needle, we needed more frequent, deeper, and consistent touchpoints across their journey. We also noticed that existing communications were all about the card’s features rather than the audience benefits. Lastly, we realized the competitors’ positioinings were about being nimble and disruptive, but felt small. We determined that Amex’s size, the same size as its global customers, and its history of serving them would play to their advantage.

We created a campaign called Built for Your Big Business, which celebrates Amex’s history of successfully serving large market businesses, bringing with them a level of expertise that is unmatched by their competitors. It has this confidence that says we’re here to reclaim our territory in a modern way. 

Now, Amex GCS has a cohesive way of talking about themselves that is customer-focused and has received the most engagement from the digital work from that campaign than anything they’d ever done before.

Client: American Express Global Commercial Services

Role: Sullivan, customer journey, campaign strategy and brief, execution briefs