The Challenge
To help close the racial wealth and opportunity gap for Black businesses in the US, Mastercard has pledged $500 million in support from funding, resourcing, and exposure to new potential consumers. Together, Mastercard, Carat, and the world’s largest digital marketplace, Amazon & Amazon’s Black Business Accelerator Program (BBA), set out to create a space for Black women small business owners to showcase their businesses, tell their stories, and increase and uplift their sales revenue. Beyond that, we aimed to also inspire other entrepreneurs to kick start their digital businesses with the resources the company has to offer and support them.
Insight and Strategy
Black women small business owners lacked a platform to showcase their businesses and tell their stories. The massive growth livestream commerce has seen, projected to hit $25B by the end of 2023**, provided an ownable entry point to showcase their businesses, tell their stories, and increase and uplift their sales revenue all at once. Our cutting-edge livestream program provided a massive stage for these Black women small business owners.
**Coresight Research
Execution, Solution and Innovation
This led to our strategy, broken down into three pillars:
Showcase Leadership: Reinforce Mastercard’s commitment to helping Black women-owned small businesses grow in the digital economy by leveraging partners to help amplify Black women’s voices throughout Black History Month.
Giving a Voice: Showcase Mastercard’s force for good by having each small business owner share the origin stories of their brands, promote their featured products, and connect directly with consumers via an interactive live chat.
Leading Action: To encourage audience participation and consumer support of small businesses, eligible customers saved 25% on any of the products featured in the livestream when they used their qualifying Mastercard.
Result and Business Effect
Mastercard & Amazon Lives’ ‘She Runs This’ campaign was an incredible success garnering an uptick of 89% of total sales from consumers who had never shopped with the brands before (Benchmark: 57% - 83%).
