Exploring how to use effective Marketing in-order to promote credit cards in UK based on public’s demands

• Investigating Current Marketing Techniques Used by credit card companies

• Studying public’s view towards credit card companies and why

• Future of credit cards

• Exploring New Ideas to Promote credit cards

• Starting a campaign to promote a brand new credit card and assess the outcome

Within what academic area will your research be? Marketing and credit card Promotion

An exploration of effective marketing techniques that are used to promote credit card companies. Often people don’t trust credit card companies, and keep away from any kind of credit spending such as overdraft, loans and credit cards. There are also a lot of bloggers and writers who campaign against credit card companies because of their mistrust. This mistrust is very usual in UK and has its reasons, one of those reasons is the mistrust which credit companies have caused previously with high interest rates and miss-selling products within the credit card agreement. This has caused a large portion of the British public not to take credit cards and in some cases be scared of the credit card companies, or become anti credit card.

As part of my thesis I will be investigating the root causes of that issue, try to find an answers and come up with a solution to promote credit cards.

Will your research be industry based? If yes, which industry or industries will your research focus on? If no, what will your research be based on (e.g. stock market data, a particular company, a particularly country, etc)?

• Credit Card marketing

• Customer satisfaction and trust in banking industry

This research will not necessarily be in relation to a particular company but will be based on credit card companies in general and the approaches which they have taken to promote credit cards. The focus of the research will be on gathering secondary data research to understand current credit card marketing strategies and also to find out how the public see credit cards and credit card companies and why. Then the research will steer towards exploring the future of credit card companies and how the current situation could be improved. The research will then end with a launch of a new campaign for credit cards and investigation on if the new campaign had any positive effects.

READ ALSO : Cognitive Behavior Therapy

What will the general topic area be, and can you give us a general overview of the developments to date in this area? What is already known about the area/industry/issue?

• Current marketing and advertisement strategies used by credit card companies

• Customer mistrust towards banks & credit card companies

• Marketing in Social networks

As mentioned previously, many consumers have lost their trust in credit card companies and banks. This forces such companies to change their strategy towards their customers by offering more valuable benefits. “As credit card spending increases, reward and cashback cards offer credit card companies the chance to encourage more frequent card use, if users can see tangible benefits to using their plastic” (S Obradovic, Mintel 2014). Offering cashback and giving rewards for spending encourages more customers to spend using their credit cards instead of the normal debit card or cash. However, banks need to provide every tool available to them to help their customers stay on top of their finance, which is one of the reasons why banks are heading towards setting up online banking and helping customers use direct debit to pay-off their debt. The new EU law which comprehends the credit companies to have a cap on transaction charges will see profit cuts that credit card companies have faced since October 2015, a number of providers have either already withdrawn or begun reviewing their credit card inducement and reward schemes as a way of maintaining as much revenue as possible. Capital One, for example, has announced and removed their cash back reward from June 2015, and Santander’s popular 123 card’s cash back on travel, and shopping is under serious consideration. This will incidentally go some way toward reducing the appeal of such cards in. Mintel’s 2014 credit card report illustrates that 38% of consumers see cash back as an influential factor in owning a credit card, therefore taking that benefit away risks reducing the interest in the product (S Song, Mintel 2015).

Credit card companies need to find ways to advertise their credit card and inform their target customers about offers and promotions. But a big challenge is to attract those customers towards the bank or building society with all the mistrust. Many credit card companies and banks offer rewards but the rewards are very small to the extent that customer does not care about it, and some make redeeming rewards so challenging that again the customer loose faith in them. All these causes customers to stop using credit cards because they do not see the point in doing so.

What issues and objectives are to be included in this research? NB: this section should be between 3 and 8 bullet points

· Investigating Current Marketing Techniques Used to advertise & promote credit cards

· Studying Current Trends in credit card advertisement

· Studying consumer’s view towards credit cards

· Understanding the directions that credit cards are heading towards in future

· Explore new ways to promote credit cards

· Launch a small campaign for a credit card based on findings and collect feedback

How, precisely, are you going to tackle this work?

• Investigation and the research of current techniques used in credit card industry and the results of using such techniques

• Study the credit card market

• For collection of secondary data different sources will be used, such as journals, case studies, company reports and published reports.

What academic models and writings would be useful in your research?

• The research will be written in a 3rd person point of view.