American Express Doubles Down On Small Merchants For Christmas

The official beginning of the holiday season is something of a moving target — particularly in the last two decades. An ever-increasing number of consumers, statistics indicate, are actually most of the way through their holiday shopping already. Whether those people ought to be admired or judged is a matter up for debate.

Increasingly, the holiday season seems to be creeping up quietly toward the end of October, which will delight some and cause others to start exclaiming about a week from today when they see the first twinkling of strings of lights:

“Christmas decorations! What happened to Thanksgiving?”

Because, for those purists, the holiday season cannot begin until Thanksgiving has ended on Black Friday.

But then again, Black Friday is not just Black Friday anymore. As of 2005, Black Friday has become a two-part holiday, sharing the bill with Cyber Monday as digital counterpart to the annual celebration of commerce that is the Christmas season. And then, in 2009, Small Business Saturday joined the party, and in the seven years since, the three days taken together represent the opening trifecta of holiday commerce.

And while the origins of Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a little complicated, the origin of Small Business Saturday is not. It is a concept American Express came up with.

“Seven years ago, when American Express was the founder and creator of an effort called Small Business Saturday, we didn’t know it was going to blossom into the full-blown event that it has as a nationally — and at this point, internationally — recognized shopping holiday,” American Express Executive Vice President of U.S. Consumer Marketing and Operations Howard Grosfield told PYMNTS in a recent interview.

But blossom it did, and so, this year, American Express, looking at the runaway success of the program, decided that there was only one way to go.

Bigger.

So, what does that mean for Amex merchant partners and their members?

Going Big

Last year, Small Business Saturday went better than well, according to Amex, with 95 million cardholders taking part. And while that’s certainly a number to be pleased with, Grosfield said, it’s not a number to settle on.

“We visit this each year in the important shopping season, and we ask, ‘How we are going to recognize and reward the business that thinks to take American Express?’ Because this is part of a 25-year investment in strengthening our ties with small business.”

So, when thinking about how to beat the 95 million customers in 2015, the question was how to start with that rewards kernel of the 2x rewards points for spending local businesses and then do more with it.

Grosfield noted that, in the changing marketplace, customers aren’t clustering their retail experiences around a single day or even a series of days. They are instead spreading their commerce activity out across an entire season.

So, going “bigger than they’ve ever gone” for American Express in 2016 means really opening up the window when those rewards for SMB customers are available. From now until early 2016, American Express customers who enroll their card online will get the same 2x rewards throughout the entire shopping season as they had access to during Small Business Saturday last year.

“This will be our largest and the longest promotion ever,” Grosfield noted. “This is across 50 card products and 13 different rewards currencies. This is the largest single promotion we’ve ever done, and we really wanted to elongate the promotion and really reward the cardmembers throughout the entire holiday season. What we’ve seen over the last few years is an increase among our members who really want to shop local. When we surveyed them last year, 73 percent told us that they prefer to shop small when they can and that they prefer it because of the unique services Main Street merchants offer.”

And more than reward the cardmembers, he noted that this story is also about American Express’ 2.5-decade effort to really develop its relationships with SMBs.

“This is really celebrating a bunch of things. We have 25 years working with small business — both with merchants who accept it and individuals who use it. And so, when we’re offering this promotion, we are also offering our partner merchants a lot of direct support from Amex. That includes all kinds of marketing promotion, free online ads, personalized downloads in-store, digital banners, social posts, and that’s for the duration of the program.”

The Importance Of Being Amex

The most exciting thing about the new small business rewards, Grosfield told PYMNTS, is that it really speaks to “what is unique about Amex.” Because of its status as both an issuer and network, it has relationships with both the consumers and retailers.

“In the last two years, American Express has added 1.6 million new business partners — 85,000 of which were in the New York City area alone,” Grosfield said. “We’re making terrific progress at marching toward parity coverage with Visa and Mastercard by 2019.”

There are a lot of steps still to take in that march — not to mention a fair number of things to trip over — but American Express is certainly committed to carrying forward. And if this holiday’s season’s push for small business shopping is any indication, it is apparently looking to march pretty quickly.