How can Mastercard integrate the “Priceless” campaign into a public relations program? MAKING MASTERCARD PRICELESS How do you pay for books, clothing, groceries, or travel? For many consumers, the answer is Mastercard, which has more than 200 million cards in circulation.47 Yet despite the credit card’s popularity, it lags behind its major competitor, Visa, by over 100 million cards. It is also outstripped by Visa and American Express for both monthly and annual purchases and spending volume.48 Because Mastercard’s primary function is to process transactions between each customer’s bank and each merchant’s bank, the company must appeal to two customer bases to build market share:

the merchants who accept Mastercard for payment and the purchasers who use the card. These audiences are closely related, which implies that a single campaign can target both, likely even for an extended period. However, even the most successful campaigns can grow stale.

In 1997, Mastercard International and the advertising agency McCann Erickson Worldwide launched the emotionbased

“Priceless” campaign, which celebrated life’s most precious moments with the tagline, “There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s Mastercard.”49 The campaign was hugely successful, saving Mastercard from disaster, even in direct competition with the more widely accepted Visa card.50 However, as consumer values and needs changed and the marketplace evolved, Mastercard faced a new challenge: how to retain customer loyalty and brand identification while reinvigorating its advertising.