Recently described during a Panorama episode as running a “tax-evasion service”, HSBC needs to apply to its public image all the feelgood Vaseline it can muster. And so to its latest ad, dripping with the milk of corporate kindness, striking up the tinkling piano music and bearing the slogan, “It’s never just business”. We see a bespectacled man clearly from the 70s enter an office-building lift, heading towards the sixth floor and his fledgling business, Cadours Industries. Cue numerous flash forwards as we glimpse him in the same lift with colleagues, family, clients: shaking hands, getting drunk, breaking up fights, even growing a beard, but always making those warm, co-operative human connections which make corporate culture what it isn’t. At the end, he has aged nicely, looking all Jack Straw-like, with Cadours Industries 2015 having blossomed into a sleek, modern enterprise, thanks doubtlessly to the invisible, benevolent and legitimate hand of HSBC.
Though you’d hardly know it from the ad’s content itself, according to the HSBC website, it’s designed to flag up the company’s 65 years of involvement in the Middle East and its support for “ambitious United Arab Emirates businesses”. The UAE has a somewhat spotted ethical record; flogging and stoning are on the statute books and still deployed, homosexuality is punishable by death, while businesses were untroubled by the effects of the Arab Spring due to would-be dissidents being jailed and tortured. Still, HSBC is relaxed about engaging with its oil-rich autocracy nonetheless. Never just business? Bottom line: it very much is.
