What IS in my wallet?

After swearing vertically, horizontally and laterally that I would never apply for a Capital One card in revolt against the Amazonian volume of direct mail they were sending me during the credit boom, I finally got one because they were the only card issuer I could find that didn't charge a foreign transaction fee. This feature alone was enough to win my loyalty, for now that travelers' cheques have vanished from the face of the earth, cards are the only way to safely carry a significant amount of value while traveling (or even when doing any intercontinental cyber-shopping). Though I have recognized the futility of forming attachments to objects since reading Siddhartha 25 years ago, I quickly found myself falling in like with this card and using it whenever I could, even when I had enough cash for the purchase.

Aside from nifty accounting features that a solid back office operation makes possible -- like choosing how frequently to receive your cash-back bonuses -- the cleverest aspect of my new card is the ability to upload my own photo. We happened to have just had a delightful holiday card photo taken, so I uploaded that. Now my card elicits delighted coos from clerks all over Denver (though they still sometimes ask to see ID). When I take it on upcoming trips to Quebec and Argentina, I'm sure clerks there will coo in their native Romance tongues.

The emotional reaction the card has provoked in me and others got me thinking about the co-branding experiment Capital One has launched. That credit cards are brands at all is something of a miracle in its own right, for Visa and MasterCard aren't products at all; they're payment transfer mechanisms. Can you imagine anything less marketable? Yet it's common to speak of having "a Visa card" or "a MasterCard" (or, more correctly I suppose, "a MasterCard card") rather than "a credit card issued by Such and Such Bank whose transactions are facilitated by the MasterCard payment transfer protocol." That's branding.

Then comes CapitalOne going to great effort to put more air between itself and the brand by allowing me to insert my image into the equation. If Volkswagen allowed customers to customize cars with, say, square roofs, would they still be Beetles? When we're told that consistency is the key to brand equity, offering inconsistency as a product feature defies logic.

So is it a Capital One card? A MasterCard card? Or my card? Can one thing really be, by the business relationships and personal desires it evokes, three things? The question is more apt than I at first realized: What IS in my wallet?