Mastercard’s sensory brand

Developing a brand DNA for haptics and touch

Challenge

In a world of increased stimuli, communicating with customers through only the visual and auditory senses risks getting lost in all the noise. How might Mastercard use the sense of touch to compliment their broader sensory branding initiative ?

Solution

Mastercard have recently been building their sensory brand to support their business on emerging and existing channels. Our team was deployed to help develop the touch component of this initiative - by using haptics to support the Mastercard sonic brand at the moment of transaction and beyond.

Working with haptics throws up a number of challenges - not least having to be able to have meaningful design discussion with a wider team spread across the world. To resolve this, we created visual and verbal descriptions of the type of vibration and haptic responses we were working with.

Haptics are used in a wide variety of contexts - from supporting visually impaired people as they navigate the world (or just enjoy a game of football) to deepening engagement in the world of gaming. We explored all the ways in which Mastercard could use haptics to build connection with their customers - from crossing the threshold of an event, to gamified physical world exploration experiences - but also focused in on the moment of transaction itself to create a haptic signature that could be deployed across point of sale globally.

Outcome

The haptic is now a vital cog in Mastercard’s multisensory toolkit, delivering a unique vibration sequence when a payment is made. The haptic mirrors Mastercard’s already iconic sonic melody, providing an additional branding touch point as more people keep their cards in their wallets.

Mastercard’s CMO Raja Rajamannar presented the haptic during his presentation at Brandweek in 2024.

The haptic signature launched initially in Latin America and Eastern Europe, and is being implemented across 50 million of the brand’s point of sale outlets over the next year.