PayPal has revealed its shiny new look and its first-ever global marketing push as parent eBay tries to wrest attention away from the growing number of rivals piling into the mobile payments market.
The brand overhaul unveiled on Wednesday includes a more vibrant, simple logo designed to suit mobile phones and wearable devices like wristbands and PayPal’s first-ever television ads in the US market. The campaign will last throughout the summer and into fall 2014 – reports Reuters.
The move comes as PayPal, the dominant online payment processor, shifts its focus toward mobile phones and the fast-growing market to enable consumers to pay for physical goods and services with their smartphones.
PayPal reveals new brand image as mobile use surges
“If you look at us visually online, we look very similar to financial service companies,” said Christina Smedley, vice president of global brand and communications at PayPal.
“Our brands and the ways consumers are going to experience them, the way people are going to touch us, is going to change hugely in coming years,” she said.
The company declined to specify the total cost of the marketing campaign, but said it was the largest ever planned for PayPal, which accounts for a large chunk of eBay’s overall stock market value and its growth outpaces the rest of the company.
The US mobile payment market will reach $90 billion by 2017, up from $12.8 billion in 2012, according to Forrester Research. Research firm Gartner expects the global market will see a more than threefold rise by 2017 to $721 billion.
That potential has attracted the likes of Amazon.com and Google. Between 3% and 7% of consumers worldwide use in-store mobile payments, but up to 27% are willing to try, according to Bain & Company.
With 143 million active users at the end of 2013, PayPal is the dominant online payment provider, but it is not used widely for in-store payments in the United States, Bain said.
This is the first makeover for PayPal since 2007. The marketing efforts come a few weeks after activist investor Carl Icahn dropped his efforts to force eBay to hive off PayPal, eBay’s most attractive and fastest-growing unit.
“PayPal’s brand refresh and new global advertising campaign reflect its determination to be seen as a multi-channel payment provider, with a strong emphasis on mobile payments that are now a priority focus for PayPal,” concludes Eden Zoller, principal analyst at Ovum.
“PayPal has moved quickly to embrace what it considers to be promising new technologies and platforms for m-payments, with recent initiatives spanning wearable devices, biometrics and Bluetooth Low Energy/ beacons. But the challenge for PayPal’s mobile first ambition is that a multitude of other players have exactly the same goal for m-commerce, including Facebook.”
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