HSBC has put a cheery face on banking with a grade-school entrepreneur in their ads Lemonade and Lemon Grove.
The first video starts with the all-American summer image of a kid earning some pocket money from her home-made lemonade stand. Suddenly trouble arises when her latest customer doesn’t have any American change. Not to worry, turns out not only does our littelest businesswoman cover all major currencies, she also speaks Cantonese. Cue a bus full of new customers and an emerging local lemonade monopoly for international customers.
This raises some questions though. Does the dad get a cut of the profits? Is her home-made sign a lewd marketing campaign playing on the “innocent small business” image? Does she skim a few percentages over the exchange rate for herself? She’s obviously put a lot of thought into this. Fast forward to the next video and the situation has escalated wildly. She now has a lemonade empire stretching at least from America to France. She has also shown her true colours as a hyper competent polyglot with revenues large enough to fly to India to expand her supply routes.
What are the fathers thinking throughout all this? Are they really as naïve as the video leads us to believe and just play along with their daughters little game of merchant? Seems so as when the girl storms off for her next corporate adventure her dad is completely out of the loop. Did she only bring him as a cover story for border controls? If the story and her business follow this exponential growth the next video will feature a global mafia-like organisation, run entirely by twelve-year olds, with complete control of the world’s lemonade trade. The slogan of the ads confirm this: “In the future even the smallest business will be multinational.” Imagine the money she saves alone on using nothing but child labour. She has definitely not filed the official paperwork and who would prosecute a kid working at a street side lemonade stand? The rest of us will simply have to pray she doesn’t turn her attention beyond lemonade.
On a more serious note this is a smart move from HSBC’s side. Bankers have not exactly enjoyed a great image in the last decade, or for that sake, ever. A positive spin and a loveable character are standard for defusing blame and shifting attention. But it seems to focus a bit too much on presentation and too little on outcome. How did the advertisement team picture this play out? An executive wondering which bank could best suit his new takeover and bam his mind flies to HSBC because of an ad which seemed more suited as a storyline for one of his kids’ tv-shows?
Andrea Newman, global head of advertising and marketing communications, HSBC, said the purpose of HSBC’s “In the future” campaign aims to: “bring a sense of warmth, simplicity and optimism to inspire growth.”
The choice of music is terrible and kind of creepy though.
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