4 Minutes With Marene Arnold: Prioritising People In Your Products
Memorable customer experiences and sustainability are two critical components to marketers’ success in 2023. MMA Germany’s Chief Content Officer Peggy Anne Salz sat down with Marene Arnold, VP of Marketing & Communications DACH, in the latest “4 Minutes With…” episode to discuss how Mastercard is prioritising these topics and providing value and experiences for their customers. Marene has dominated the marketing space for 15+ years and, as a NXT-GEN Fellowship for Moral Leadership Graduate from the HOW Institute for Society, is dedicated to building businesses with strong morals and values-based behaviour.
Check out Marene’s full interview below.
Building Value Through Experiences
Great customer experience (CX) means more customer acquisitions, better customer engagement, reduced costs of marketing, and stronger customer loyalty. Forrester research reported that offering high-quality CX can lower customer-care costs by up to 30% and brands that provide superior CX bring in 5.7x more in revenue than their competitors with lacklustre experiences.
Mastercard knows the benefits of prioritising people in business are endless. “We know
that consumers value experiences more than things,” Marene says. “We are using our platform called Priceless for the things money cannot buy to engage with consumers and cardholders all over the world.” To bring these experiences to life, Marene encourages marketers to research their target audience’s local passions and investigate the ways people really want to spend their time and money.
The Trend To Pay Attention To In 2023
In a 2017 CSR study, Cone Communications found that 88% of customers show stronger loyalty to companies that support social or environmental issues. Similarly, 89% of companies with a recorded commitment to being eco-friendly will outperform their competitors. However, marketers must go beyond environmental impact when thinking about sustainability to encompass all three components of the triple bottom line: planet, profits, and people. At Mastercard, that means integrating inclusivity on product and campaign levels.
Mastercard recently announced its touch cards — cards equipped with tactile notches to help blind and visually-impaired people differentiate between their credit, debit, and prepaid options. “This is something we really want to make an industry standard,” Marene says. “And to me, this is a great example of inclusive thinking, both in product and how we brought this product to market. We created marketing assets that were especially for visually-impaired people.”
Sustainability tops the agenda at Mastercard and Marene suggests this is a mission that could extend to all aspects of marketing.
“It could range widely from sustainable media buying and media processes to green coding or even more inclusive targeting,” Marene explains. “I’m actually really interested to hear where the MMA thinks [the industry] is going to go.”
