New data analysis indicates that AmEx, Visa, MasterCard and Discover card use varies dramatically across the USA (view press release) Litle & Co, a payment processing company for consumer-direct brands, have released results of a spend map - based on average daily spends per capita - analysing around 20 million direct response transactions driven by television infomercial and home shopping networks, catalogue call centres and online marketing programmes in Q1 2012. The data showed that the proportion of orders paid for with AmEx was highest on the West Coast and in the Northeast. Discover Card orders were proportionately higher in the Midwest, while MasterCard payments were higher in the Midwest and South. Conversely, the proportion of orders paid for with Visa was highest in the West, while there were pronounced differences in regional use of prepaid Visa and MasterCard cards compared to traditional credit cards.

"Analysing the payments data of our own merchant base we are able to identify trends such as these. Creating these spend maps reveals valuable payments intelligence and insights many retailers don't even realize they have, which can be used to supercharge customer marketing and to influence other business decisions including media buying," said Bala Janakiraman, vice president of customer value at Litle.“For example, our spend maps depict that lower population-density states and regions – where brick-and-mortar retailers are fewer and further between – are more likely to favour direct response purchasing. This intelligence can be used to corroborate media planning for direct response marketers."