Mastercard puts "Priceless" to work on small business
A new McCann campaign called "Dreams" stretches the 29-year-old platform onto the shop floor, backed by research the company has named Dreamonomics.
Mastercard has launched a suite of small-business products called the Mastercard Collection for Business, and rather than build it a brand of its own, the company has run it straight through the platform it has been paying into since 1997. The campaign, from longtime agency McCann, is called "Dreams," and the ads carry the line "Building your dream business. Priceless."
The creative work keeps the "Priceless" grammar but changes the subject. Instead of a milestone in someone's personal life, the payoff is an operational headache disappearing for real businesses — among them The Meat Hook, a butcher, and Noble Signs, a sign shop. It is a small, smart move. Nothing in the platform ever said the thing money can't buy had to happen outside of work.
Underneath it sits a research program the company has branded Dreamonomics, which is the kind of proprietary-language play that either gives a sales force something to sell with or quietly dies in a deck. Its finding, at least, is more useful than most: small firms are not trading ambition against caution. They want growth that is predictable, protected, and easier to manage all at once.
"Small businesses bring the dream; Mastercard brings the infrastructure to help propel, protect and power that dream," said Mark Barnett, the company's global head of small and medium enterprises. The product range splits along those lines, into Business Growth, Business Lifestyle, and Business Security, with heavier cyber protection and more digital tooling than the category usually bothers with.
The strategic interest here is the restraint. A payments company launching into small business has every incentive to invent a sub-brand, name it something with a lowercase letter, and spend three years explaining it. Mastercard instead borrowed the equity it already has and pointed it somewhere new, which costs less and lands faster.
Whether it sticks depends on whether business owners read "Priceless" as speaking to them or as an ad they have watched for most of their adult lives about someone else's wedding. The tagline does a lot of work to close that gap in eight words. The products will have to do the rest.
Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →
