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For branding in Hong Kong bank industry, most of banks focus on highlight professional, reliability and history as brand positioning, for example a) Standard Chartered, mentioned it has operated for over 150 years in some of the world’s most dynamic markets and expressed heritage and values in brand promise, “Here for good”; b) HSBC, focus on mention their comprehensive range of financial services through customer groups and global business, in order to show their professional and reliability. Most of the brands in this industry mainly focus on traditional advertising channel such as TVC, print ad and large offline campaign, but invest relativity less in online advertising, especially in social media.
Undoubtedly, the cost efficient of traditional advertising media is much lesser compare to few years before. On the contrary, the development on online advertisement keep enhancing with a high speed. More brands are willing to invest in social media due to the popularity on Facebook, WeChat and LINE as they treat this as a chance to extend new target segment, create bonding and maintain relationship with existing fans through interactive communication. With the increase uses of smartphones in nowadays society, exploring social media platform on mobile device becomes one of the key habits in everyone’s daily life. Most likely, people are more willing to watch their phone instead of watching TV, magazine or billboard. As such, online advertising community becomes a must for brands who want to expand in recent.
We have been following our motto “Progress with prudence, service with sincerity” since we founded in 1933. Although we have founded for 82 years, we are not conservative like the other china-based banks. We seek for innovation by stepping out of the traditional advertising area of banking, we invest more in social media to expand our market segment, build and create bonding with people through new advertising channel.
A brand mascot is a common way in branding design, mascot usually makes people feel young, energetic and innovative. Brand mascot is not a usual way on branding in the bank industry, so we think using a mascot as a repretative will make us extraordinary.
We chose WeChat to put our step into the digital world in 2014 because WeChat is an innovative mobile social communication application for international users, there are more than 396 million monthly active users worldwide and is the number one chat app globally as of the end of March 2014.[1][2] Moreover, WeChat is an instant two-way communication channel, brand can communicate and manage followers wants, needs or questions through a complete admin platform to provide better service experience.
Therefore, we created CMB Wing Lung Bank Superhero to be our mascot especially for our target audience of youth and young adult segments on WeChat.
Out of many kinds of social media platforms, why do we choose WeChat over other social media platforms, such as Facebook, LINE or WhatsApp?
There is an obvious advantage on using WeChat when comparing with other social media. To compare with other social media, WeChat has an obvious advantage, the popularity in Chinese market. The Chinese economy has been growing steadily in recent decades, the market in China becomes the largest potential market worldwide. As a Chinese based bank, most of our clients are based in China, or need to communicate between China and Hong Kong. There is an obvious advantage for us to use WeChat as the platform to communicate with our clients, the popularity of WeChat in China market allow us to provide our sincere service to clients in any moment.
Moreover, research has shown the largest user age group in WeChat is between 25 to 34 years old, where has 40% among WeChat users that is under 65 years old.[2] The research also mentioned WeChat’s user base has the higher share on the younger age profile compare to Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.[2] With our target segment on social media is the youth and young adult group, WeChat becomes the best match for us to promote our brand in the youth and young adult segment.
In the field in online marketing, establishing a fan page on Facebook has becomes a usual way to engaging people in social media, however, the deliverable of a fan page is less than our imagination. The positioning of Facebook today is more like a newspaper with thousands of feeds updating everyday day on Facebook, the client, or fan, may only skim through the posts and fan page cannot deliver their messages to their fan. This is the reason why we choose WeChat as our main tool to communicate with our clients, once our clients has followed our official account on WeChat, we can update our news through the instant messaging system, to ensure our latest news can reach to our clients and continue interactive with them.
When we mention about the instant messaging system above, you might wonder why we choose WeChat but not LINE or WhatsApp? For LINE, the usage in both China and Hong Kong are comparatively low to WeChat, hence, the production time for applying an official account in LINE is too long, LINE is not our best choice to spread out our messages. For WhatsApp, it is the most popular communication tool in our daily life, but WhatsApp do not provide official account service, it is not suitable to gather a group of fans for a brand. In fact, under WhatsApp’s terms and conditions, WhatsApp will suspend its account if such account is for any commercial use.
WeChat has the feature similar to Facebook and Twitter, which is called moment, to make our image more lively. Also, people can scan a designated QR Code and start following an official account on WeChat, which means we can put such QR Code on our offline materials to bring our clients from offline to online easily. WeChat also allows brand to choose their target segment, for example, target audience’s age, gender and region.
Apart from that, we also used WeChat menu bar in our official account to provide unique, automatic and personalize service to each of our followers, such as interact with followers when festive is nearby, automatic seminar application system and share specific tips to users.
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What would you think of if someone mentions to you about bank in Hong Kong? Would you think of a group of decent people having wine or tea in a balcony with an extraordinary sea view? There is no doubt that the theme of luxury or a premium lifestyle has become the main stream in the bank industry, not only in Hong Kong, but also in other parts of the world. In fact, it is a quite straight forward thinking, because every product or service that we can find in bank is about finance, and everyone wants to have a better lifestyle, this is the reason we compose similar scene when we hear the word “bank”.
Other than that, we found the color tone in existing banks in Hong Kong are very similar, for example, could you define Development Bank Singapore and Bank of East Asia by only comparing their campaigns? With all the similar color tones, it is very difficult to distinguish. To avoid main stream becomes our inertial thinking, we think it is the time for we to bring people think out of the box.
Back to the core value of the word “bank”, why “bank” is that essential to everyone? It is because we need a place and a group of people to manage and protect your properties. We found that the word “bank” cannot make anyone become wealthy , “bank” is only an assistant to help you get wealthy easier. Hence, our role, as a bank, is to solve our client’s problems.
Who will protect you, and solve your difficulties immediately when you need help? Obviously it is not those decent people that we usually spot on the bank campaign. He is strong and smart, he is someone who acts fast, he is the SUPERHERO!
The age group of middle age is usually represented the decent people in the bank imagination mentioned above, this group of people usually have their own financial basis, and hence they become the main target segment for all the banks. Unfortunately, the financial problems happen to all age groups, including the youth and young adult, we think this is where we could breakthrough, we are going keep our traditional element, yet being innovative at the same time.
CMB Wing Lung Bank Superhero is the result of this approach, the Superhero let people feel energetic, which has similar characteristic to our target segment of youth and young adults. We make Superhero solely exclusive to activities on our WeChat’s official account, where most of our followers are youth and young adults, to creating bonding with our clients.
As mentioned above, most of the banks in Hong Kong have a similar color tone of red, which include us. Therefore, we are going to keep this traditional color to show the confidence to our clients in elder age segment. In the base of red, we have applied other CMB Wing Lung Bank’s elements on superhero’s costume, such as the symbolic seven lines and the logo right on the chest area, to make him becomes our unique CMB Wing Lung Bank Superhero.
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On the other hand, our superhero is always here for our clients, he is always on WeChat celebrating different festivals with our clients. Superhero being around all the times allows us to approach our clients in a more friendly and closer way, and all these makes CMB Wing Lung Bank becomes memorable. As always, we will following our motto: “Progress with prudence, service with sincerity.”
With our target segment of youth and young adult becomes the largest user group in WeChat, we do our promotions for this segment mainly via our official account on WeChat.
In every festivals, we would send out our festive feed to celebrate with our followers, CMB Wing Lung Bank Superhero will then appear with different looks to fit the occasions. The main approach of these feeds are not for selling products, we only want to share the joys with our clients, and build our brand image at the same time. We also encourage our client to share our festival feeds with their friends, to spread out the brand new image of CMB Wing Lung Bank in a soft way, rather than the hard-selling way which is most used by other banks in Hong Kong.
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With the WeChat search bar with our official account name putting in every news feed with Superhero, this allow our prospective clients to search for us on WeChat even they know Superhero from other platforms, and become one of our followers eventually.
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Apart from the superhero design, our copywriting also tailor made for our character, by using vivid terms, tone and manner. For example, the feed included “Superhero assistant reminder”, main copy and “Tips from Superhero assistant”. And we aim to share something related client’s daily life instead of products.
In every festival, “Superhero assistant reminder”("CMBWLB私人助理") will share some warm greetings to our followers. And the main copy will become more informative, we are using a causal way tell our target audience something more about our daily life, which is different from others banks. For example, during our Christmas festive feed, we explained the Christmas culture, why people need to give gifts on Christmas. Lastly, we have a “Tips from Superhero assistant”("私人助理小Tips") to slightly introduce the latest offer of CMB Wing Lung Bank, which is related to the season and festivals.
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To increase the memorability, we are using causal and interesting wordings, sometime with emoji, to deliver the warmest greeting to our clients and build the friendly image at the same time. With blessings from our Superhero in every festival, along with the interesting copywriting and superhero’s design, we believe people will think of us whenever they see other superhero and banks.
Although Superhero has only made his appearance on our WeChat official account, we believe he has already become the signature for our WeChat official account to the youth and young adult segment.
In conclusion, there are over 438% increase in followers within the period from June 2014 (Superhero launch) until now. Moreover, we found that this WeChat campaign is cost efficient, which only cost USD 0.9 per followers acquisition and the outcome of product application via WeChat channel contribute 52% comparing to other online channels. This is a great success for us and we hope this can continue!
CMB Wing Lung Bank, founded in 1933, is among the oldest local Chinese banks in Hong Kong. Following its motto of “Progress with prudence, service with sincerity”, the Bank provides comprehensive banking services, including deposits, loans, wealth management, securities, credit cards, NET Banking, syndicated loans, corporate financing, bills, hire-purchase and leasing, foreign exchange, insurance agency, Mandatory Provident Fund, etc. CMB Wing Lung Bank also provides futures broking, insurance broking and general insurance underwriting, property management, trustee, nominee as well as asset management services through its wholly-owned subsidiaries. At present the Bank has 49 banking business outlets in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Macau and overseas, and a staff force of more than 1,700 people. As at 30 June 2014, its consolidated total assets stood at HKD246.3 billion. CMB Wing Lung Bank became a member of China Merchants Bank Group in 2008 and subsequently a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Group in 2009. China Merchants Bank, the 6th largest commercial bank by total assets in China, is currently among the top 100 banks in the world.
1. Tencent Inc. Weixin/WeChat. Retrieved January 29, 2015.
2. WeChat Retains Crown as Top Mobile Messaging App. globalwebindex. November 20, 2014. Jason Mander.