The Long Reach and Implications of Credit Card Marketing

Since the 1960s, credit card companies have been investing tens of millions of dollars a year in “training” us that we can’t live without their cards. It started with “just for emergencies,” the still-popular “just in case” and “ease of financial planning” to the point were one out of seven Americans now has 10 or more of them.

It’s also been so long ago that few people still remember that Visa used to be called Chargex and MasterCard was called MasterCharge. But then – those names sounded too much like a bad thing. Both of them kind of sounded like debt, and that’s the last thing they want us to think.

But their marketing goes a lot deeper and is a whole lot smarter than the current Visa ad campaign that “Life Takes Visa.” Well, life takes cash, too – but fewer and fewer people have any of that, so it’s not really a stumbling block to Visa anymore.

Read more at: The Long Reach and Implications of Credit Card Marketing