OPEN: Small Business Network
American Express saw enormous opportunity in their small business customer base and wanted to develop a brand that spoke specifically to them, and so OPEN was born. The brand and the business unit would be solely focused on the needs of the SMB audience, trying to find better ways to connect.
Our team, owning the digital channels, was tasked with making sure the brand encompassed concrete action to back up the new look.
Through our development of products like web-based tools and financial management dashboards we got to know the customer better and we saw the opportunity not just for clever brand tactics but a real and lasting brand platform and cultural change for Amex.
By sharing our insights through training, videos and the work itself we were able to help re-educate the smart marketers at Amex and show them that many of their assumptions about small business owners were flawed and that they need to view their marketing as a service to their members and not simply a messaging megaphone.
That brand platform was the basis for breakthrough work like the OPEN Forum and Small Business Saturdays – the former starting out as a promotional blog experiment and the latter coming from the audacious brainstorm idea of “What is we gave them a national holiday?”
