• The Case for Brand
  • Posts
  • 💸 How CashApp Used Brand to Become a $40B Player in Peer-to-Peer Payments 💸

💸 How CashApp Used Brand to Become a $40B Player in Peer-to-Peer Payments 💸

How Cash(App) Rules Everything Around Me through Conviction, Customer, Collaborations and Culture

January 12, 2024

Welcome to the Case for Brand: the place for breakdowns of authentic brands. You'll get the cheat codes to build a brand that builds your bottom line with: 1 case study/week and 3 actionable tips. Like what you read? Click the button below to join for free. You can also book a 1:1 call with me, ask me anything, or get on the waitlist for my brand audit framework.

👋 Hello!

Today’s brand breakdown is CashApp.

To understand CashApp, first we need to understand just how utterly broken the banking system is:

What I like most about CashApp: they’re unafraid to throw out the banking playbook and write their own. CashApp operates more like a social platform than a bank.

How CashApp started:

  • established in 2013 as a startup within a startup (Square, now Block) during a hackathon

  • Got early traction with the customers Venmo and Paypal weren’t targeting (un and underbanked)

  • Reduced signup friction by removing the requirements needed to sign up and allowing users to signup first, verify second, and introducing $cashtags (similar to Venmo’s usernames)

How CashApp’s going:

Today, CashApp is part of culture. Proof: CashApp’s name started popping up in rap lyrics. In April of 2021, GQ took notice. Wells Fargo could never.

Much has been written about CashApp’s growth. What I want to call attention to is how CashApp successfully harnessed its conviction to connect with customers, community and culture, and answer the million dollar question:

How do you earn the right to play in culture?

First, let’s look at the competition.

Breaking away from a Boring Category

Buckle up and pour yourself a coffee - this category is b-o-r-i-n-g.

Allow me to explain. I looked at the ads that America’s biggest banks ran during fall of 2021. While CashApp was partnering with hip hop stars America’s biggest banks were:

  • Releasing press statements about being ‘real life ready’ with Wells Fargo’s Active Cash Card (Wells Fargo), featuring Regina King in a heavily scripted ad 

  • Running innocuous ad about customers using B of A’s cash rewards card to make their home office more productive (Bank of America)

  • Running this ad 👇 boasting about 200 years of experience (J.P. Morgan Chase)

Still with me? I know, it nearly put me to sleep, too.

Let’s look at how CashApp goes beyond the category norm of saying they’re relevant to actually being relevant.

How CashApp’s Brand Uses Conviction to Earn Cultural Cachet

It all comes down to conviction. CashApp wants to redefine peopl’es relationship with money. Here’s four things CashApp do to grow like a social platform, not a bank:

❤️‍🔥 Conviction. CashApp’s ‘why’ is to“redefine the world’s relationship with money by making it more relatable, instantly available, and universally accessible.” If I had a dollar for every time I read a financial institution’s intention to ‘democratize finance’ . What CashApp does is a little less talk & a lot more action - they execute on their mission. Strategy is 👏 nothing 👏 without 👏 execution.

👯 Customers. CashApp got early signal the app was heavily used by an early group of customers. Importantly, this was group the banking industry ignored: un and underbanked Black Millenials and Zoomers from the south. Remember CashApp’s why? CashApp put their money where their mouth (universal accessibility) by building a better onboarding experience that made deposits instantly available. This was a big leg up on Paypal and Venmo’s 3 day cashout period. Then, they observed what users were doing: men and women asking each other for $ for grooming and drinks on #CashAppFridays. CashApp piggybacked on the existing behavior by giving away cash to users.

This is brilliant because it's a pure brand awareness move: the goal isn't to build loyalty or convert a new user, it's to spread the word about existence. In an industry where the cost to acquire a customer is in the hundreds of dollars, CashApp's is estimated ~$10.

On top of that, Cash App often includes a prompt with its Friday posts to encourage participants to involve a friend. These instructions, like “tag a shopaholic for good luck,” cast its net wider while simultaneously broadening the applicant pool.

Cash App Friday isn’t a loyalty program. It doesn’t reward power users, and there’s no incentive to use the app beyond accepting one’s would-be winnings. Hanna says the giveaway’s goal isn’t even to influence people to open Cash App every day — it’s to spread the word about its sheer existence.

🤝 Community. Engaging their community is where many companies would have called it a day, but CashApp didn’t. CashApp bet on the opportunities that arose from embedding themselves in their community. What CashApp did here was brilliant - giving their partners creative control over how they used the $ - (but use CashApp to do it). They all used it slightly differently:

This isn’t just smart brand awareness - it also functions as an extremely low cost customer acquisition play: ARK Invest estimates that if only 129 of the 120,000 customers who commented on Travis Scott’s giveaway tweet were new to CashApp, then the cost of customer acquisition would be less than the $925 per user that banks pay on average. At the same time - the converted users spread the word on social media, meaning CashApp acquires additional users as a result of the promotion.

📰 Culture. You can’t gatecrash culture. CashApp put in the hard yards to be useful and authentic to their community. As a result, it’s the most socially discussed money transfer service in the US. This gives them an outsized share of voice - with their users generating word of mouth for them. The holy grail. Because they’re cool, CashApp have the ability to recruit and collaborate with influencers from the hip hop world and the finance world (see: ‘That’s Money’ featuring Kenrick Lamar and Ray Dalio).

Again - think about how different this is from Wells Fargo, B of A, JP Morgan Chase.

 

4 Questions to Lead Like CashApp

CashApp is courageous. They’re leading with what they believe and rewriting the playbook on how a financial services company communicates.

Changing behavior starts with conviction, finding and nurturing early customers, and embedding yourself within a community so that you earn the right to exist in culture. Here are three questions to ask yourself to lead like CashApp.

  1. Conviction. What do we believe? How does that intersect with what our customers believe - a common pain point, goal, or way of identifying?

  2. Customers. How are our potential customers using our product or service? What’s taking on a life of it’s own? How can we accelerate that behavior and reach more people?

  3. Community. Who is a leader in the community our customers exist within? How can our product or service help them reach their goals?

That’s all for today!

Need a hand?

If you’re reading this newsletter and you need a hand on brand I’m your gal. Three ways I can help you:

1️⃣ Book a 1:1 call with me where we can jam on goal-setting, any brand strategy problem, framework, or question you have. To book a one hour session, click this link. For longer engagements, reply to this email & we can work out a plan.

2️⃣ Ask me anything. I’m looking for feedback on this newsletter, and to say thanks, I’ll reply to all questions, requests and comments left in the survey. I’m also giving away a free 45 minute strategy call to one person who filled out the survey where we can jam on any problem you like or just share a bev & a chat. To ask a question, opt in, or just share your feedback, click this link.

3️⃣ Get my brand audit framework: A Guide to Laying the Foundations of a Bold Brand. I’m creating something to teach you how I audit brands. This is the process that I’ve used to lay the foundations for globally awarded brand strategies at For the People agency, build Future Super, and write this newsletter. Launching on February 9. Click here to get on the waitlist.

Thanks so much for reading!

Amanda