@FinStar wrote:
@SoCalGardener wrote:
@dragontears wrote:
@SoCalGardener wrote:
@Anonymous514 wrote:Amex isn't prestigious lol.
That's interesting--most people think it is. Care to share your thoughts?
Amex isn't "prestigious", their marketing department did a good job of propagating that imagine ...
I just know that from when I first started getting credit, being able to have an Amex card ... meant you had a certain financial status.
... back in the 70's or 80's, things were different as far as the underwriting criteria. AmEx and Diners Club competed fiercely for their share of the market. But, times have changed and today's generation isn't as impressed by those things anymore.
^ This ^ Alongside Diner's Club in the 1950's, American Express was one of the earliest widely-accepted credit/charge cards. And underwriting standards were much different. So yes, for those of us over age 50, we remember when AMEX cards did used to mean some exclusivity for good reason. But I agree that while the actual "exclusivity" has deteriorated over the years, AMEX marketing has been successful in keeping that image largely in-tact in much public perception.
Take this 1970 advertisement for American Express. The ad stated that the minimum salary to be considered was $7,500, which equates to about $55K in today's money. Since the US median household income is around $65K, that would have eliminated about half of the population, even before any other underwriting considerations. Sure, that's not uber-exclusive territory, but that by itself gives you an idea of the selectivity. For those of us who didn't come from money and whose fathers worked blue collar jobs, I'm sure that perception of exclusivity was even stronger.
There's also the lifestyle promoted in the ads and the American Express travel benefits that dated back to their business in traveler's checks. Both frequent airline flights and frequent dining out are things that were more reserved to the wealthier half of the country back in the 1950's to 1970's. Neither were as common as today for the average American.
And charge or credit cards themselves were also not common, so having a credit card by-itself was a differentiator of "status." According to the Federal Reserve, >over 80% of the population< didn't have a bank-type charge or credit card in 1970.
"... bank-type cards issued under the Visa and MasterCard brands are so widely held and used today that it is difficult to imagine that they were not especially common only three decades ago. Known at that time as BankAmericard and Master Charge, respectively, and issued only by commercial banking organizations, they were a new product in the mid-1960s and by 1970 together had reached only about one-sixth of families ..."
@wasCB14 wrote:"not every man can"
"our kind of man"
Not an ad that has aged well.
We've made allowances for the Declaration of Independence, to adapt it to modern thinking, even though the mindset of the framers was more restrictive than anyone today would like.
It is important to recognize the scope of American Express history. They've been innovating for a century, particularly in international payments, business travel, and products like travellers cheques that were more secure than cash. The print ad is reflective of that as "The New Money" short term credit, was a new development.
https://about.americanexpress.com/our-history/default.aspx
