Western Union leverages the phone number list passions of its customers to inspire remarkable content. Laston Charriez, the company's senior vice president of marketing for the Americas, explains how it's innovating in a conservative industry.
Few brands have been household names for as long as Western Union. Launched in 1851 as the phone number list New York & Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company (the company changed its name to Western Union in 1856), the brand boasts an impressive list of "firsts": the first transcontinental telegraph, the first transatlantic cable, the historic telegram confirming the Wright brothers' first flight and the world's first commercial beam radio system.
Along the way, the phone number list telegraph company transformed into a global leader in payment services. Today, Western Union's portfolio of brands - including Vigo, Orlandi Valuta, Pago Facil and Western Union Business Solutions payment services - provide consumers and businesses with fast, reliable and convenient ways to send and receive money around the world.
In 2014, the phone number list Western Union Co. completed 255 million consumer-to-consumer transactions worldwide, moving $85 billion between consumers and making 484 million business payments. Charriez leads marketing for the phone number list company's largest region - the United States, Canada and Mexico. He sat down with me to talk about Western Union's strategy and the brand's ability to connect with a diverse audience.
Western Union has an incredible content microsite dedicated to home cooking around the world, a recent collaboration with Marvel Comics, and even a stint on Jimmy Kimmel. How are ideas like this born?
We carry out “passion point” studies with the phone number list help of an agency, Networked Insights. We bring consumers together and uncover their interests, then continue to peel the onion to understand their true passions. We use an index - a numerical indicator - that lets us know how strong these interests are for the phone number list general public and for our consumers in particular. When our consumers over-index on a topic (i.e. when their numerical indicators are much higher than the general public), we know we are on something that really matters to an audience we want to reach.
It is this same process that led us to understand the phone number list passion of a group of consumers for home-cooked meals from their region or country of origin. We discovered that food was a point phone number list of passion and then our social media team listened to what people were sharing.