KAIST Marketing Chase Sapphire Creating a Millennial Cult Brand Case Study

Please read the attached case “Chase Sapphire: Creating a Millennial Cult Brand” and answer the 3 following questions.

1. The value of individual adopters of the Reserve card will depend on their behaviour: how much they spend, whether they pay all of their charges in full each month, and whether they renew their card annually or not. As noted on page 3 of the case, customers can be classified as transactors, revolvers, and dormants. Assume the following for each group:

Transactors

Spend $16,000 per year.

Carry no credit balance

Renew the card at $450 annual fee.

Revolvers

As for transactors, but carry a credit balance of 50% of annual spend.

Dormants

Spend only enough to earn the sign-on bonus

Carry no credit balance

Do not renew the card after a year.

Calculate the margin Chase earns at the end of the first year for each group. Assuming a 5 year horizon, and ignoring the time value of money, calculate the lifetime value, whether positive or negative, of each group.

2. What is your assessment of the Chase Sapphire Reserve card’s customer acquisition strategy?

Where has it been successful in assembling a portfolio of users, and where does work need to be done?

What do you make of the 100,000-point sign on offer?

Why reduce the offer to 50,000 points?

Should Chase have pre-announced the end of the 100,000 point sign-on offer (in other words should they have told customers early in January that it would end later in January) and have kept the offer in place until March for people who applied in person to a branch?

3. At the time of the case (July 2017) what actions do you recommend that Codispoti and Serra take to manage the Reserve product and customer base? What actions do you recommend for managing the broader Sapphire portfolio?