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When I was but a lad, I went to a seminar (yes, a real, live
event that I actually had to leave the house for) put on by Bob Bly. I checked
Amazon and Bly hasn’t published a book on copywriting in a few years, but back
when I was starting out, he was the crown prince of freelance copywriting.
One story he told has always stuck with me. This may be a BS
story he concocted just to make a point, but he told us of a fellow copywriter
who, to be as frugal as possible, did his own landscaping, home maintenance,
etc. Being as tight as he was with his money, he couldn’t understand why he
didn’t have more of it. Bly’s answer was obvious. The guy was spending too much
time saving money and not enough time making money. The lesson was: Do what you’re
good at and let other people do what they’re good at. Easy enough, right?
I’ve applied this rule time after time in the ensuing years,
and it’s always served me well. Sure, I did my own brakes one time and built
myself a PC once, but those were mostly just to say I did it. Generally
speaking, I let the experts do what the experts are trained to do. However, it was
only in the last couple of years that I realized all this is really just a
lesson in brand extension.
(Click here to read my previous post on Amazon’s
insanely goofy brand extension strategy.)
If my own brand is all about providing top-notch marketing
and writing services to fintech companies, I’m truly stupid if I attempt to
extend my brand into, say, landscaping – even if I’m only providing those
services to myself. I need to stay focused on great marketing and writing, and
let the gardener mow the lawn.
So what do lawn mowers have to do with mobile payments?
Funny you should ask.
First, let me say for the record that payments have always
been mobile. Cash is mobile. Credit cards are mobile. But of course, we’re
talking about device-centric mobile
payments. That’s a whole new ball game. And because it’s new, somebody needs to extend their brand
into this space to fill the void. Should it be Apple and its partners, or
should it be the retailer consortium known as the Merchant Customer Exchange
(MCX)?
First let’s look at MCX, which really has no brand of its
own. However, its big backers – CVS, Best Buy, and Walmart, for example – do have
well-established brands. What do they all have in common? They’re all retailers. Beyond the fact that they’re all
retailers, they have no experience in payments and payment systems, nor do they
have any experience in developing consumer technology products. This all raises
a giant brand extension red flag for me.
On the other hand, we have Apple, a company whose entire
brand centers around making the human experience cooler through technology.
From what I can tell, Apple Pay does exactly that. And while one might argue
that Apple has no experience in payments, the same can’t be said for Apple’s
partners in this endeavor – partners like Visa and MasterCard, along with
hundreds of banks and credit unions. In other words, Apple Pay seems like a
very logical extension of the Apple brand.
The folks at MCX have been pretty tight-lipped about the
specifics, so speculation about potential technical issues has run rampant.
Will transactions be settled one at a time via ACH, much like an uncoupled
debit card? Will consumers need to preload their CurrentC account? Will
consumers need a separate instance of CurrentC on their phone for each
retailer? If yes to these last two questions, will all CurrentC instances share
a common balance?
These are questions for another time, and probably for
someone else’s blog. In the meantime, from a purely brand-oriented perspective, Apple
Pay seems to be the obvious frontrunner in the mobile payments race. Walmart
should stick to what it does best: selling stuff for dirt cheap and providing
fodder for websites like this.
That is all.
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