American express encourages mobile commerce through consumer data for brands

AMEX plans to offer its “spend graph” database information to help companies customize their mcommerce

American Express group president, Dan Schulman spoke in London at the Open Mobile Summit, and stated that the credit card giant is moving in the direction of the development of a mobile commerce ID that can be used by consumers, to provide a total of their totals as well as the brands to which they have the greatest loyalties.

AMEX partner brands could use this information for better targeting of smartphone consumers.

This will help to improve the way that they provide those consumers with various ads and offers when they are near a store’s location or when they are using the internet in a way that indicates that they intend to buy something.

Among those brands partnered with American Express are Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, and a vast number of additional merchants that accept mobile payments and traditional transactions through the use of that company’s credit card.

When he spoke at the summit, Schulman stated that the mobile commerce ID would be quite dissimilar to the social ID that is already well recognized. The latter is the way in which consumers are targeted by companies and brands through social networks. It is based on the postings that are made on those sites, where they mention what they would like in their lives instead of what they already have.

He explained that “Marketing going forward is not marketing to segments of the population, it’s to each and every one of us…the great thing right now is that we can measure this very specifically…data is the holy grail of digital commerce.”

Schulman also added that this data gives brands and AMEX, itself, additional understanding of whether online advertising is successful, as it can be directly linked to mobile payments and purchases dragged from the ad into a mobile wallet, followed by a completed transaction. He and his company believe that this will provide brands and merchants with very powerful information about their marketing and improved targeting.

This may change the way that companies understand the behaviors of consumers through their mobile commerce marketing efforts.