Whenever I watch an end-of-the-year commercial signed by a bank, I wonder what world bankers live in. In fact, it doesn’t take much thinking to imagine that they live in a world intoxicatingly filled with happiness.
A world in which everything emanates a vigorous peace, that peace that is born from the certainty of one’s own security with regard to the present and the future, from oneself and all of us.
A world in which projects are not just dreams, but emerge certain of their concreteness, as they will never lack resources to make them viable. A world in which children are born rewarded with a life full of goods and opportunities to become healthy and successful adults.
A world without fear, as it will always be possible to keep the necessary distance from what is frightening. A world of deeply self-confident people, where pleasure is the reason for living and everything, therefore, must lead to it.
Perhaps the end of the year will inspire a certain capricious melancholy, and these people contemplate other mortals, struggling in their plight, and think: my God, we need to give these people hope, help make them have faith in the future possible…
And they trigger their marketing departments, which trigger their agencies, which trigger their creatives. And the banks’ year-end commercials are generated. Tailor-made to be watched between sips by Richard Henessy and with teary eyes. And not by 74% of indebted Brazilians. People who live to try to maintain credit, the only way they have to stay alive. These 7 out of 10 people we come across, who bear the mark of an inglorious struggle in their days, the fight against the threat of a default that makes their roles as parents, children, wives, husbands, and nullify their existence as citizens.
People who live with their rope taut, skinning themselves so as not to get their name dirty. They leave the fairs happily, where they renegotiate their debts at an 80% discount, the balance of which is paid over another 24 months.
This is one of their moments of greatest delight, of greatest pleasure, when they leave the “clean name” fair, having to pay the renegotiated for two years.
A “generosity” of the system so as not to kill the debt business. It is with these poor people that the bank’s year-end commercials try to talk, inject positive expectations, promise that things will get better, even (or on purpose) without making it clear what this means.
It makes sense: there is such an extraordinary distance in the concept of “improving” between one world and another that it is impossible to explain. Resulting in these messages richly empty, structurally fragile, effectively innocuous, fancifully creative, to invade homes, in an attempt to move those who have already spent all their tears with the bad news.
Anyway, what kind of business is it that doesn’t identify objective elements in its own core to justify a sustainable message in terms of credibility and emotion?
Stalimir Vieira is Director of the Marketing Base ([email protected])
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