The Saison American Express card and a complete four-brand line-up (1997)

Completing the range by borrowing someone else’s brand

The essence of this decision can be seen in the fact that Credit Saison completed its range not by building an international brand of its own but by borrowing the assets of a counterparty that had changed its policy. Had American Express kept insisting on issuing only its own cards, there would have been no route by which Credit Saison could assemble all four major brands. In the agility with which it caught the moment its counterpart switched strategy and slipped in as the first such issuer, through the gap opened by Amex’s conflict with Visa and Mastercard, one sees the light-footedness peculiar to a retail-affiliated card company. Refusing to insist on its own colours and borrowing usable assets from outside is of a piece with the heavy use of alliances that came afterwards.

That said, completing the range by borrowing Amex’s colours was also the reverse side of the fact that control of the brand ultimately rested with the other party. While the fourth card broadened the base, the valuation of the premium segment depends on the brand power of American Express itself. How far the company could deepen its own relationship with its customers on a borrowed brand was a question carried forward into the later attempt to build an economic zone of its own. This single move in 1997 reflected, at one and the same time, the company’s strength in nimbly taking in outside assets and the limits inherent in borrowing them.