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Habib Bank Limited

Banking is a Serious Business!

A Critical Review of Mr. Bean; Phone


Banking Campaign of HBL

Author: Adeel Sattar

About this Article:


This is a subjective critical review of the commercials of HBL phone banking which stars Mr. Bean (lookalike
as the lead actor. This study is opinionated and maybe used as a single person’s criticism or opinion on this
marketing campaign.
CRITICAL REVIEW OF PHONE BANKING CAMPAIGN OF HBL

Critical Review of Phone Banking Campaign of HBL

Company profile
HBL is on the leading Banks of Pakistan and has shown great strengths and business in terms of
customer base and deposits. It was first commercial bank developed in 1947. They also claim to
be the largest private sector with 1450 branches and more than 5 million customers. HBL is
currently rated AA (Long term) and A-1+ (Short term) and has a balance sheet size of USD 10.2
billion.

Objective of this Article:


Launching a marketing campaign is a huge decision; heaps of questions are raised like:
 Will this make the product/service work
 Do we really need it, need analysis
 Is it really worth the money being spend [Cost benefit Analysis]
Unless all these questions are satisfied no one goes a step closer to the completion of that
campaign. Were these question answered in this particular Mr. Bean, Phone banking Marketing
campaign?
We will basically analyze the effectiveness & appropriateness of this particular campaign from a
critic point of view.

Concept:
The notion behind this add is to make the consumer believe that our Services is very User
friendly, so user friendly that even someone like Mr. Bean (who is considered to be a simple man)
can use it.

Critical Review:
This section of the article will explain what went wrong in this campaign.

1. Banking is a Serious Business


A very large percentage of potential Banking sector customers are beyond their teens. Even
teenagers cannot be impressed or persuaded to buy or use something with a Brand Ambassador
Mr. Bean so for that matter even if a Music star was chosen as a lead in the TVC would have
been a wrong choice principally. Mr. Bean;
Who in reality targets very young children aging from 4 to 12 years, in his own original series
does not expect older, business men, professionals…etc. to watch his movies SO how can one
expect to Pitch banking services to Adults with a fake Mr. Bean.
Moreover the actual potential customers of a Bank would not like to be associated with someone
funny, dumb, simple or even non serious.

2. Wrong Market Targeted


Mostly the target market of phone banking would be:
a. Employed personal
b. SME’s
c. Retired people
To be very broad in the target market we may assume that all people who own an account who
are probably >18years of age.

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CRITICAL REVIEW OF PHONE BANKING CAMPAIGN OF HBL

What HBL targeted were small children who would after 10 years (maybe) become potential
Customers. So either it was a very long term brand entity development or just playing stupid.

3. Wrong Brand Ambassador


When a Celebrity someone like Mr. Bean (lookalike) stars into an advertisement, that means the
creator of that add wants to use the charisma, popularity and relevance of that particular person
to make the target audience feel that they need to have this product/service so that they can be
associated to that particular celebrity. But unfortunately no sane professional, business man or
grown-up person would like to be associated to a credit card when he pictures Mr. Bean using it.
So in reality this campaign has made the existing HBL customers a little less proud of being a
part of it (presumably).

4. Fake Mr. Bean


Copy cats are not an inspiration but rather a disgrace for the people they represent. Maybe if the
real Mr. Bean was contacted to star in this commercial he would have talked some rational to the
Brand managers of HBL to use another approach.

5. Humor Appeal, Not very well done!


Let’s assume that the idea and concept was very workable in our industry and some people
would have been convinced to use HBL after this commercial. But still the humor created in these
commercials was not funny. Humor appeals are the most tricky to work with in the advertisement
industry but still people smile or laugh the first time they watch it, in this case the numbers of
smiles were limited and laughs were none.

Summary:
HBL may show profits and success of this campaign with numbers of increasing phone banking
trend in their company BUT there is always an Estimated growth expectancy behind every
intelligently launched campaign, i.e. that with the launch of this campaign we will increase users
by X percentage in Y period, I mean a complete growth forecast with 90 to 95% accuracy must be
populated for the approval of such campaigns.
My point is very simple, I highly doubt that this campaign measured up to those expectations of
the stake holders.

Regards,
Adeel Sattar
+92 345 4001192

Reference:
Commercial can be viewed here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=380QGdF9kSI

HBL details can be viewed here:


http://www.hbl.com/

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