Discover launched a brand campaign late last year, dubbed “Especially for Everyone,” featuring comedic actress Jennifer Coolidge and highlighting the brand’s customer service accolades.
“We’ve known for a long time that Discover has a very special relationship with our customers,” said Jennifer Murillo, SVP and CMO at Discover Financial Services, while speaking at an Advertising Week panel in New York City. “We see it in survey rankings… But we see it every day in the interactions that our customers have with agents and the comments that we get on social, in ratings and reviews.”
Fast-forward to Super Bowl Sunday, and the financial services brand has launched another spot under that campaign umbrella. This one focuses on the brand’s human-centric customer service by pitting it against automated, “robot” messaging systems. We caught up with Discover CMO Jennifer Murillo to discuss the company’s latest commercial, how it fits into the overall marketing strategy and why a pre-game spot was the right choice.
Chief Marketer: Your latest spot will air during today’s pre-game. Why did you choose to run it then? And is there a challenge to cutting through during this time period?
Jennifer Murillo, SVP and CMO at Discover Financial Services: We’re really excited just to be a part of the day on Sunday, and we had the opportunity get an ad in the pre-game show. The audience is huge, and the timing is perfect because we were planning to release the next ad in our campaign right at this time period anyway. We wanted to take advantage of the giant audience that is going to be tuning in.
It’s always a challenge to break through to customers and consumers because everyone is busy and there’s so many things that are vying for people’s attention. The best way to break through is to make sure that we have something important and relevant to talk about. And if we can do that in a way that’s fun and brings some happiness to somebody’s moment, then that definitely helps.
CM: Talk about the brand’s decision to veer away from technology, while other brands are leaning into AI and its integrations.
JM: AI is great when it helps you, but sometimes those experiences end up being really bad. We’ve all ended up in those moments where you’re in this doom loop that you can’t get out of and you can’t get help—and you have to hang up. And even if you try again, you might not get where you need to go. We never want that for our customers, so we make it easy to get to a real-life representative so that they can help you.
CM: How does this fit into Discover’s marketing strategy overall?
JM: It’s part of our broader campaign and strategy: Discover is “Especially for everyone.” And that’s about showcasing and bringing to life the great experiences that we’re delivering for our customers. Our goal is for more people to get to know about that experience and to remind our customers that we’re here for them.
CM: In general, what other aspects of your customer service are you highlighting?
JM: All of our customers can talk to a real human representative, in the U.S, and they’re available 24/7. I would add, we want to be there for our customers, however they want to show up. Plenty of our customers are looking for service digitally. We’ve got an award-winning, mobile app… we service in social… Where our customers show up is where we’re going to be and where we’re going to deliver those great experiences. So, whether you do want to talk to a human or whether you want to just quickly get some information on your phone, we’re here to make that as easy and as useful as we possibly can.
Image Credit: Discover
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