Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
By Jim Daly
Grizzled veterans of the payments industry may not have warm and fuzzy feelings for card networks, but the view can be different from consumers’ eyes. In its 27th annual study of brands, a newly released Harris Poll EquiTrend report ranked Visa Inc. as the No. 1 payment card brand for five years running. The 2015 poll also asked consumers about mobile wallets for the first time, with PayPal Inc. coming out the winner by a wide margin.
The January-February online survey of 38,670 U.S. consumers ages 15 and older asked for opinions about 1,410 brands. Each respondent was asked to rate a total of 40 randomly selected brands, with each brand receiving approximately 1,000 ratings. In comprising a so-called brand-equity rating for each brand, the poll asked consumers questions about their familiarity with a brand, its perceived quality, and whether they consider it when making purchases.
Visa ranked as the highest payment card in brand equity for at least five years, Harris said in a news release. Harris didn’t release ranking values, but said MasterCard Inc. came in No. 2, with American Express Co. and Discover Financial Services ranking below the category average.
Other brands that were tops in their categories for five or more consecutive years include Hallmark in greeting cards, Sears’ Craftsman in power-tool brands, Subway among sandwich stops, and Target, despite its 2013 data breach, in mass merchandisers.
The survey also polled consumers about mobile wallets for the first time. “Despite category fragmentation and limited familiarity across brands, the category is poised to transform very quickly,” Harris said. “PayPal, the established ‘click-and-pay’ brand, leads direct competitors by a wide margin.”
PayPal’s brand image in mobile payments is not surprising given that figures from its parent company eBay Inc. and other surveys show it to be the leading mobile-payments provider. In the first quarter, PayPal and its Braintree and Venmo affiliates handled more than 300 million mobile transactions, with mobile traffic growing 40% annually.
Various services from Amazon.com Inc. came in second, third and fourth among mobile-payments brands, with PayPal’s PayPal Here point-of-sale service ranking fifth. Ranking below the category average were a number of other services, including Google Inc.’s Google Wallet and Apple Inc.’s Passbook and Apple Pay. Harris noted that some wallet services have been rebranded, such as Visa’s V.me becoming Visa Checkout and MasterCard’s PayPass becoming MasterPass, but that mobile wallets associated with the card networks or Amazon, Google, and Apple can count on a level of familiarity because of their link with the parent brand.
“Market fragmentation, rolling rebranding, and merchants waiting for the shakeout before investing in systems has gotten in the way of adoption,” Joan Sinopoli, vice president of brand solutions at Harris Poll, said in the release. “When one of these brands gets the execution right and merchant acceptance hits critical mass, consumers appear ready to jump on board.”
Apple is scheduled to release its quarterly earnings late Monday afternoon and could provide some insights about adoption of its 6-month-old Apple Pay service.
Harris Poll is a unit of New York City-based The Nielsen Co.
