Green Dot 2014 Annual Report Download - page 12

Sales and Marketing
The primary objectives of our sales and marketing efforts are to educate consumers on the utility of our products
and services in order to generate demand, and to instruct consumers on where they may purchase our products and
services. We also seek to educate existing customers on the use of our products and services to encourage increased
usage and retention of our products. We accomplish these objectives through various types of consumer-oriented
marketing and advertising and by expanding our group of retail and other distributors to gain access to additional
customers.
Marketing to Consumers
We market our products to a broad group of consumers, ranging from never-banked to fully-banked consumers.
We are focusing our current sales and marketing efforts on acquisition of long-term users of our products, enhancing
our brands and image, building market adoption and awareness of our products, improving customer retention and
increasing card usage. To achieve these objectives, we highlight to consumers the core benefits of our products and
services and how the use of our products can solve their fundamental money management needs.
Our marketing campaigns for our prepaid financial services involve creating a compelling in-store presence and
product placement on television shows, retailer promotions such as circulars, online advertisements, and co-op
advertising with select retail distributors. GoBank is offered at Walmart using similar strategies.
Marketing to Business Partners
We use a variety of marketing strategies to engage with our business partners, including retail distributors, tax
preparation partners and network acceptance members.
When marketing our prepaid financial services to potential new retail distributors, we highlight several key benefits,
including our leading national brand, our in-store presence and merchandising expertise, our cash reload network, the
profitability of our products to them and our commitment to support our brand through national marketing efforts. In
addition, we communicate the peripheral benefits of our products, such as their ability to generate additional foot traffic
and sales in their stores and higher average purchase amounts per transaction. We engage in similar strategies when
marketing to our tax preparation partners.
We market our reload network to a broad range of banks, third-party processors, program managers and others
that have uses for our reload network’s cash transfer technology. When marketing to potential network acceptance
members, we highlight the key benefits of our cash loading network, including the breadth of our distribution capabilities,
our leadership position in the industry, the profitability of our products to them, consumer satisfaction owing to the
consistency in the user experience and our ongoing support of our network's offerings through national marketing to
consumers and retail partners.
Customer Service
We provide customer service through numerous technologies and channels for all of the products provided by our
company to consumers. Generally customer service for our products is available to our consumers and to our distribution
partners on a 24-hour per day, 365-day per year basis.
Competition
Our core businesses include the offering of prepaid cards, checking accounts and financial transaction processing
services to a wide range of consumers through broad, national distribution channels. Consequently, we compete
against the full spectrum of companies across the retail banking, financial services and transaction processing services
industries. In addition to the direct competitors described below, we compete for access to retail distribution channels,
allocation of shelf space within those retail distributors and for the attention of consumers at the retail level and online.
Furthermore, many of our primary competitors are entities substantially larger in size, more highly diversified in revenue
and substantially more established in age with significantly more broadly known brand awareness than ours. As such,
many of our competitors can leverage their size, financial wherewithal, brand awareness, pricing power and
technological assets to compete with us.
Prepaid Card Issuance and Program Management
We offer branded and private label deposit account card programs that directly compete with other banks that
issue prepaid cards and other program managers that provide turn-key services for prepaid card programs. Primary
competitors in this business include traditional credit, debit and prepaid card account issuers and prepaid card program
managers like Chase, USBank, American Express, First Data, NetSpend/TSYS, UniRush, InComm, Western Union,
MoneyGram and Blackhawk Network Inc.. In addition, from time to time, new entrants introduce prepaid card products
or other products that seek to target that similar customer that could increase competition in this market.
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