For foreign students, studying abroad means leaving everything behind and living in a different part of the world, alone, for the first time. The distance and separation can feel overwhelming.

92% of foreign students suffer homesickness, affecting their well-being and their studies.

HSBC believe that ‘Together we Thrive’ – and they want their students to thrive too.

They asked us to launch a campaign which would connect them more strongly to the student market.

Campaign Objectives

• Target outbound markets (primarily Asia) where international students reside with an emotive story that demonstrates HSBC knows and understands what it means to move and study abroad

• Demonstrate that HSBC goes beyond financial products to offer students solutions that address the emotional cost of living abroad.

We created, ‘The Sounds of Home’: an intricately crafted sensory campaign to transport students back to the places they love, with the power of sound.

Bespoke soundscapes made up of locally recorded sound samples were weaved together to recreate ‘the sounds of home’ and optimised to live on digital, including Spotify, Soundcloud and as Alexa tasks. Captivating animations were designed to accompany the scapes on YouTube, client-owned channels and social.

We met students where they were (on social) and then created bespoke soundscapes which would resonate with them.

The originality of the creative and the innovative approach for HSBC (this was HSBC’s first influencer-led campaign) was the earned engine for the campaign, which would connect to audiences and media worldwide.

HSBC believes that ‘together We Thrive’. The key message of the campaign of this campaign was that the HSBC is the bank to support their foreign students – not just by account handling, but emotionally too. They understand what it is to be a foreign student. They know what it is to miss home.

The target audience was universities students – reached through online and social.

Insight:

Students who miss home can feel isolated and lost. But what is it to miss home? Home isn’t just the location – it’s the whole sensory experience.

Studies have shown that of all the senses, sounds are the most missed.

To help students thrive while abroad, could we find a way to support them emotionally, by bringing them closer to home?

The campaign was targeted at foreign students from Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, India, Hong Kong and China (countries know to have the highest number of students studying internationally).

First, an influencer campaign would engage foreign student audiences and elicit user-generated responses to discover which sounds they most missed when studying abroad. We earned relevance with students by harnessing the power of our influencers' relationship with their followers: by crowd-sourcing recordings from their fans, it enabled us to communicate HSBC’s brand essence in a charming, authentic and relevant way.

Every sound used in each of our tracks was a culturally relevant and particular sound, recognisable to inhabitants of that place specifically – for example, singing refuse trucks from Taiwan, calls of India tea sellers and the chirping of cicadas in China. At each point, enhancing our brand reputation and building emotional relationships with students.

Please see confidential information box for full results