Wonga, that denizen of the modern age, has branched out. No longer just providing desperate people short term loans at stupidly high interest rates, with the help of a series of disturbingly lifelike granny puppets, they are now turning their hand to sorting out the UK’s flagging business sector as well. Nice of them. Loans of £3,000 to £10,000 will be available for terms of between one and 52 weeks to viable business clients. Appropriately, a new advert campaign is needed to spread the word (just in case all the negative articles in the press didn’t do the job quite well enough). Lo and behold, the buses of London are adorned with Wonga adverts.
To be fair, compared to the frankly terrifying old people grooving in an old people’s home mysteriously well equipped with DJ-ing accessories and hope, these adverts are fairly inoffensive. They suffer terribly from what is known as the Innocent Smoothie disease, greeting the viewer with a friendly upbeat tone that masks the sad fact that they are about to mug you of 4,214 per cent APR, or of £2 for a bottle of mushed up fruit. But this is business, people. So the adverts are black, as opposed to Wonga’s usual colour palate of friendly, non repossessing your house royal blue. Black is serious, a good colour for business, which is also serious. It doesn’t get more nuanced than that.
The slogans are even better.
“Our branch address? Wongaforbusiness.co.uk”
“Loans 24/7 because business isn’t 9-5”
“Business loans: think outside the bank”
Clever, aren’t they? Notice how they take a well known business slogan and gently subvert it. It’s because they’re innovative. As the chief executive said in a recent interview with the Guardian, the company wants to “innovate around the edges”, acting as “the Amazon of financial services.” And why wouldn’t you want to be known as that? It’s not as if Amazon ever did anything a bit dodgy.
The latest Wonga news is that they have been warned by the Office of Fair Trading about their “aggressive” debt collection, after sending threatening letters and accusing customers of being fraudsters. Not so fluffy now. They are also getting involved in promoting financial literacy in schools, an area that is admittedly much wanting, but one that isn’t an obvious move for a company reviled for its irresponsible lending. Indeed, it seems like not a day goes by when the company isn’t in the news. Maybe they didn’t even need to pay for those bus ads. Still, at least they seem to have jettisoned the creepy puppets.
They say: “Young, entrepreneurial companies represent our best hope of a recovery, yet many are struggling because they can’t get quick access to the credit that they need to cope with everyday challenges”
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