At a time when so many countries are building walls, Canada opens its doors to over 300,000 immigrants annually, with the vast majority arriving in July and August. Once these families make Canada their new home however, the transition period is always filled with stress. And now they also face the current toxic climate of isolationism and xenophobia. As a global bank with branches in more than 60 countries around the world, HSBC decided it could do something to help make the transition into Canada a great deal more welcoming. One major issue standing in our way though was that despite being known around the world, in Canada, HSBC’s awareness is much lower than the five major Canadian banks and their massive budgets. To convince thousands of immigrants to open an account with HSBC, we needed to create a loud, unexpected campaign that would stand-out and get shared.

When it comes to brand awareness in Canada, HSBC lags well behind the five established Canadian banks. To overcome them and grab the lion’s share of newcomer account sign-ups we needed to create a campaign that would breakthrough with much smaller budget than our competition was spending. Another issue was that HSBC was seen by Canadians and immigrants alike as a global bank – and not a Canadian bank. So while we needed needed to flex our international credentials to earn the trust of the families arriving in Canada, we also had to prove to our target that we understood Canada and Canadian values. Only then would we convince them that we were the right bank to help them integrate into their new home. Our overall objective was to get people talking about HSBC and lift our newcomer account sign-ups by 10-15% over the previous year.

Our target for this campaign was two-fold. Our most immediate target were newcomers and recent immigrants who had been in Canada for less than two years. These individuals were the ones most affected by this recent wave of xenophobia sweeping the globe. They were also the group that could most benefit from HSBC’s suite of newcomer account offers and customer service benefits. We also had the secondary goal of reaching established Canadians as well. In Canada, HSBC is much less well-known that the five big Canadian banks. As a relative newcomer to the Canadian marketplace, this loud welcoming campaign would go a long way to showing that HSBC understands Canada’s welcoming ideology. And most importantly, that the bank shares this ideology and lives it every day within its branch locations.

To begin, we created a symbol of Canada’s welcoming spirit during the two months that immigration was its highest. We then travelled to Canada’s busiest airport, Toronto’s Pearson International, and laid-out 100 rolls of industrial geotextile creating the world’s largest welcome mat. At over 85,000 square feet, our record-breaking mat was the size of two football fields. To ensure our target could see it, we worked with Navigation Canada and placed the mat directly under the flight path of Pearson’s main runway. Online films outlining the mat’s creation were created for social and pre-roll. And eventually due to the overwhelmingly positive response, 30 and 60 second commercials were created for television. We amplified the campaign with billboards, digital and social posts. Finally we partnered with Canada’s largest multicultural network and created a TV show called “Your New Life in Canada.” that helped newcomers adjust to life in their new home.

Despite having only a fraction of our competition’s budget, our welcome mat became the most successful newcomer campaign in HSBC’s history. Canadians and newcomers alike saw our mat and began talking about it. This social conversation created millions of earned impressions. Influential Canadian bloggers, Laney Lee and Alexander Kenton saw and wrote about the campaign, generating an additional 2M organic impressions. In the end, we generated over 11M impressions with a budget that should have produced far less than half of that. But the metric that really mattered to the bank was new customer account openings, and that is where this campaign really excelled. In the summer of 2018, HSBC had record newcomer sign-ups with an incredible 48% year over year increase. By exemplifying Canada’s welcoming spirit, HSBC proved to thousands of newcomers that HSBC was the perfect bank to help them start to build their new life as Canadians.