Mastercard has put small business owners front and centre in its first global campaign dedicated to the segment, shifting the focus to the dreams that prompted owners to start a business in the first place.
The new platform, ‘Dreams’, has launched in Australia with a refreshed tagline: “Giving your dream a go. Priceless.”. The platform brings Mastercard’s almost 30-year-old ‘Priceless’ platform into a small-business setting.
The campaign is built around Mastercard’s Dreamonomics research, which surveyed more than 6,000 small and medium-sized businesses across 18 markets to understand how owners define success, growth and their ambitions for the future.
The research found that growth is not necessarily about getting bigger, faster. Nearly 70 per cent of SMEs globally said they prioritise stability and predictability over fast growth, while 61 per cent would rather deepen relationships with customers than simply reach more of them.
For Mastercard vice president, marketing and communications for Australasia Alexandra Sloane, those findings helped shape a campaign that looks beyond the usual small-business narrative of growth at all costs.
“Small businesses are such a critical part of the economy here in Australia and around the world,” she said.
“What we found was that small business owners are focused on sustainable growth, predictability and meaningful relationships.”
That led Mastercard towards a more personal question: what is the dream behind most small businesses?
“The dream is individual to every single small business owner,” Sloane said.
Rather than attaching that dream to a particular product or definition of success, Mastercard went directly to business owners to understand what motivated them, what they hoped to build and what their next chapter looked like.
The result is a cast of real Australian business owners spanning different industries, business sizes, stages of growth and locations.
Among them is the owners of Barrell Honey Farm, Studio Mouvior and Barrel One.
The use of real business owners was also central to how Mastercard has extended ‘Priceless’ into the small-business space.
“No one remembers the transaction. They remember the conversation they had, the shared moment with somebody. That’s what Priceless is all about,” Sloane said.
The campaign was developed with Mastercard’s global and local agency village and overseen and managed by Mastercard’s in-house marketing and communications team. McCann globally managed the creative and TBWA\Sydney localised it. EssenceMediacom handled paid media, comms sat with Ogilvy PR.
The campaign put human stories around those transactions ahead of the Mastercard products facilitating them.
“We’re focused on experiences like dining, travel, because those things enable the human connection at the end of the transaction,” Sloane said.
It is a similar principle to the one Mastercard has applied to SMEs, where payment is one part of a much bigger relationship between a business and its customers.
“It’s about the things people feel most connected to when they think about how they spend,” Sloane said.
While the campaign is deliberately light on product messaging, Mastercard saw its role as providing the technology, payments infrastructure, security and support that allows small businesses to pursue those ambitions.
That includes Mastercard’s cybersecurity resources and its developing Virtual C-Suite, an AI-powered solution designed to give small businesses access to virtual executive capabilities including financial and cash-flow support.
Mastercard has also positioned Dreamonomics as more than a one-off campaign, with the research intended to inform how it supports small businesses as their needs and challenges evolve.
For the Australian campaign, however, the focus has remained firmly on the people behind the businesses rather than the products they use.
“It’s about contextualising what Priceless means for this segment,” Sloane said.
And rather than treating the “dreams” as synonymous with endless growth, Mastercard has bet that the more human version of small-business ambition will resonate more strongly.
The campaign will run across out-of-home and social, with longer-form content and podcast audio also forming part of the rollout. A ‘Dream Diaries’ content series will accompany the campaign to take audiences further into the stories of those behind the businesses.
