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Manufactured Spending And Abuse Killed AMEX Offers




In the recent weeks it has been reported that American Express is now hard limiting offers to one per person. As a group the Manufactured Spending group, caused AMEX to close the loop hole. Money was bleeding out for all the cards. Unlike Citigroup, who were fined for poor IT protocol, AMEX took this opportunity to save money for themselves and their partners. Obtaining AMEX cards as an authorized user were given out like it was going out of style. It was far too easy.

What Caused AMEX To Kill AMEX Offers?

Abuse. Manufactured Spending. I’ve been in a fortunate position to be on the side of a company where an AMEX offer was solicited and can give high level details. 

AMEX have a category managers seeking out partners who are interested in a promotion. The retail partner will target specific customers within their database and send to AMEX. Together, they may potentially add a marketing partner for even more specific targeting. 

Once the companies figure out the marketing purposes, like new customer acquisition, retention, loyalty, or whatever they are trying to achieve the retail partner and AMEX figure out the budget and who pays for what. AMEX knows their customers very well with all the personal information and adding a retail partner they can narrow down the subset. A third marketing company is added to narrow the focus to have a high impact marketing. As an example of an AMEX offer could be target all customers who have never shopped with a particular retailer before and the marketing company and AMEX will coordinate a list for approval. Another AMEX offer could be you have not shopped at a particular retailer in a long time and the retailer wants to bring you back again. 

All of the AMEX offers cost a lot of money and there has been enough analysis that there has been too much abuse of the offers and enough weight has been pushed from AMEX and retailers to save everyone marketing money. This also gives the stores a better analysis of who uses the AMEX offer and who they can target in the future instead of the wild outliers from MS.

10 comments… add one
  • What was the point of this post? Everything you said was common knowledge. Dig into the details of your specific customer situation. That would be helpful. Was your company gamed?

    How do offers cost a lot of money? The discount is usually 10-20%. Are your margins that low?

    Reply
  • Blogging killed ms and all deals. Too many people invited to over expose too many gigs

    Reply
    • Once you sussed out the facts you knew what time it was. Have a goot day

      Reply
  • This was some seriously sloppy English. Weird word order, run on sentences, missing punctuation. It’s as if you didcated the post to your phone while in a hurry on the subway.

    Reply
  • I’m sure only a small minority of the point and mile crowd churned AMEX offers. I personally have not been receiving anything meaningful for over a year and I did not even churn it therefore from my point of view perusing over AMEX offers has been more or less wasted time. Therefore I think the points made above about AMEX losing money etc. are not correct. However a corporation like AMEX surely is under investor pressure to boost profits so even small leaks are looked at and removed. This isn’t a difficult in times of Almighty IT and skilled database programmers.

    Reply
    • Chuckling at your statement: “I’m sure only a small minority of the point and mile crowd churned AMEX offers.”

      Numerous blog/forum/social media posts indicate the “point and mile crowd” regularly shared and availed themselves of loopholes for obtaining AMEX offers on multiple accounts.

      Reply
  • Poorly written article. Doesn’t make much sense and seemed like info would be detailed, but it never happened. This is sloppy.
    I get the impression a hired hand was turned loose with the boss’s password.

    Reply
  • Any post that gets a comment by Marathon Man can’t be worthless.

    Good to see you’re still in the hunt, Kemo Sabe.

    Reply
  • Hmmm chasing the points

    Reply
  • This is an awfully written article. It resembles the ramblings of a drug fiend on a high in a very dark place, with no regard for grammar whatsoever. I could not read past paragraph 3 and I’m not even a native speaker. Please hire or pay your editor more!

    Reply

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