Joe Clift

Senior Vice President, Brand Management Visa Europe London, U.K.

Flexibility and innovation characterize Joe Clift’s approach to marketing at Visa. He works with programs across all 32 of Visa’s European countries, and focuses on driving card usage in all retails sectors and promoting a range of credit, debit, commercial, pre-paid, contactless cards in those markets where they are most relevant. Although there is a perception that Europe is now a fairly unified region, Joe Clift can attest to vast differences among individual markets given varying stages of credit maturity and card penetration. As a result, understanding each market’s growth dynamics, or underlying barriers to growth, is crucial to forming the right product and communications mix to drive usage in both transactions and gaining additional card holders.

Clift sees a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing as a thing of the past for Visa. “What's ground-breaking for us now is that we are being more flexible and attuning marketing mix by country. We are also flowing out real product innovation, such as the recent Visa payWave launch and the mobile/NFC payment pilot with Nokia.” Both of these programs are starting in London, and are intended to make Visa more relevant and vibrant as a brand, bringing real value to consumers, and enabling Visa to leverage inherent brand preferences.

Visa payWave enables a cardholder to simply wave his Visa card in front of a secure reader. It is faster, only requires a signature for larger purchases, keeps the individual in control of his card, and reduces the potential for fraud. The Nokia pilot brings together the convergence of payments and mobile communications. Near field communication (NFC) technology can facilitate secure, contactless payments quickly using a mobile device. An NFC chip in a Nokia phone can act as a card and/or a reader — enabling consumer devices to connect, receive and share information, and make payments.

”We are also open to greater experimentation with different media, different channels, different retail sectors, and different partnerships in each of our European markets,” say Clift. Examples include extensive use of "path to purchase"/POS media in UK, Spain, Poland, and the Czech Republic to sponsorship of the Visa Peoples Fashion Awards in Norway, to Olympic and Paralympic Team Visa athlete mentoring programs across 8 European markets in anticipation of the Beijing Games. Clift continues, “It's varied, but it's all relevant to the business requirements which the marketing mix needs to drive.”

Joe Clift was born in Cornwall in Southwest England, studied French and German at Oxford, then lived and worked in France, Germany, and Spain. His career started at Ogilvy & Mather, where he stayed for 13 years until moving to client-side marketing roles at UUNET, WorldCom and MCI. The attraction of an international life only seems natural, yet Clift emphasizes, “I believe we are all citizens of the world, not of one country, so we must gain those international experiences to justify our place in the 21st century society.” Contact: cliftj@visa.com

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