Project Description

Four years as American Express’s strategic partner across divisions — culminating in the premium card’s evolution into a flexible-payment future.

Brand Context

American Express is one of the most valuable brand promises in financial services. “Backing” isn’t marketing language at Amex — it’s an operating principle the company has built over 170 years, from travelers’ cheques to Small Business Saturday to the Centurion portfolio. The challenge for any brand that iconic isn’t relevance; it’s evolution. How do you keep backing a customer whose definition of what they want from a financial partner is changing faster than the category can adapt?

Between 2017 and 2020, we became Amex’s go-to strategic partner for exactly that question. The relationship began with a single brief and expanded into more than ten engagements across travel, loyalty, purpose, savings, experiences, talent, cash back, and — at the center of it — the evolution of the Centurion premium card portfolio.

The Challenge

How do you help one of the world’s most admired brands evolve — division by division, audience by audience — without diluting the promise that made it admired in the first place?

Strategic Insight

Every project returned to the same tension: Amex’s brand equity was built on a premium, pay-in-full, earn-your-way-in ethos — but the people Amex needed next had grown up with on-demand everything. They wanted control, not credentials. They wanted flexibility framed as empowerment, not as compromise.

The insight we brought across the work was consistent: Amex shouldn’t soften its premium stance to meet new behaviors. It should expand what “premium” means. Premium could stop meaning exclusion and start meaning empowerment — the right to pay, save, travel, spend, and grow on your own terms, with the brand standing behind the choice either way.

That reframe showed up differently in each engagement, but the same strategic thread ran through all of them.

Creative Execution

Over four years, the work spanned nearly every part of the Amex portfolio:

  • Premium Card Product Evolution (Project Tetris / Power to Flex). Developed the unifying positioning for new flexible-payment features rolling out across the Centurion portfolio — turning “pay in full, carry a balance, or pay in installments” from a product feature into a statement of cardmember empowerment, tightly connected to the broader Backing to Thrive brand strategy.

  • Perceptions of Lending. Led the strategic work to position lending inside the Centurion portfolio for the first time — addressing the reality that a third of cardmembers were revolving with competitors and the brand needed language that extended elite status into credit.

  • Common Ground (Travel). Reframed Amex’s travel network for a millennial audience skeptical of legacy travel brands, building around emerging patterns like friendcations and staycations.

  • Marriott Bonvoy Partnership. Built the Take On The World platform uniting two global brands at the launch of Bonvoy, and introducing the new program to SPG loyalists.

  • Global Brand Purpose. Developed the decision-making framework that translated Amex’s purpose into programs and behaviors at a societal level — a tool the brand could act on, not just talk about.

  • Personal Savings. Created the Whatever you save for, save more platform, giving a previously fragmented product a unified voice consistent with the global brand.

  • Cash Back (Trademark Transactions). Reimagined the category from “more money” to “more time” — developing signature, ownable product and service innovations to lift the program out of commodity.

  • Experiences (Unlocking Moments of Joy). Answered a blank-page brief — if you had to build Amex Experiences from scratch for millennials, what would it be? — with a phased roadmap for events, partnerships, and activations across live, travel, wellness, and social good.

  • HR / Tech Talent (Code for Continuous Development). Defined Amex’s employer-of-choice platform for top-tier technology talent competing against Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

  • International Women’s Day. Created the I Am___ internal campaign celebrating the full range of roles and identities women hold across the company.

Results

  • Multi-year partnership across 10+ strategic engagements, spanning premium cards, loyalty, travel, savings, purpose, experiences, employer brand, and internal culture.

  • Unified positioning for flexible payments across the Centurion portfolio, aligning new product features to the Backing to Thrive brand strategy.

  • New strategic frameworks — from Common Ground’s modern-traveler reframe to Time Back’s cash-back reinvention — each designed to give a specific Amex division a defensible position in a fast-moving category.

  • Trust at the senior-leadership level across multiple divisions, with work that repeatedly moved from positioning to internal operating language to external expression.

Reflection

The most rewarding thing about the Amex relationship wasn’t any single project — it was the compounding effect of working with a brand that takes its own promise seriously. Every engagement was, in the end, the same question asked from a different angle: what does “backing” look like here? The answer was never the same twice. But the discipline of trying to answer it honestly, division by division, is what made the partnership work — and what makes Amex one of the few brands where the marketing still earns the myth.

Backing, reimagined.

Executive Head of Strategy · Phenomenon