Bank advertising evolves from promoting thrift to encouraging consumption
Bank of Finland exhibition chronicles century of bank advertising
By Katri Kallionpää
Invest in yourself! Realize your dreams! These are messages contained in advertising for Finnish banks.
In previous decades, the message in bank advertising was quite different: saving money, working hard, and renouncing pleasures is the way to make the money that is handed down by previous generations grow, with the aim of passing on an even greater amount.
A nostalgic look at the reliable old-fashioned values is possible at the Money Museum of the Bank of Finland, which chronicles bank advertising of the 20th century.
"All the way until the crazy years of the 1980s, the mindset that prevailed in Finland was that the people are incapable of making decisions themselves. Banks taught people the value of saving money. Their advertising reflected the values of an agrarian society, where inherited land was supposed to be passed on to the children larger than it originally was", says the initiator of the exhibition, Bank of Finland researcher Antti Kuusterä.
Kuusterä has written the histories of the Finland’s Savings Banks and the Cooperative Banks, and the latter has a chapter on bank advertising.
The posters on display were found when the banks happily dug up about 200 photographs of their advertising from 1900 to 1990. The exhibition has more than 60 different posters, as well as a number of television commercials.
In the regulated society of the postwar period, saving money was important, because the country needed capital for investment, Kuusterä points out. There were no real differences between bank groups with respect to the ethos of saving money and progress.
However, Kuusterä says that the ideology of progress was strongest among the cooperative banks, which were tied to the thinking of Santeri Alkio. Alkio created the ideological basis for the Agrarian League, which later became the Centre Party. Their tone remained the same until the 1970s.
Nevertheless, banks competed for customers to the extent that even the Union Bank of Finland claimed to be a "reindeer-herders’ bank" in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The ideal of saving money and progress began to change gradually. The first signs of such a change could be seen in the 1960s, when holiday travel, cars, and summer cottages began to appear in the advertising, as goals worth saving money for.
In some matters, banks were rather progressive. For instance, youth featured in bank advertising at an earlier stage than ads for other services.
Banks also appealed to female customers at an early stage. One Savings Bank advertisement referred to women as "finance ministers of the home".
The first signs of appeals to hedonism began to emerge as the new millennium approached. "Time for yourself", was the slogan in a Merita Bank advertisement.
The exhibition ends with the Merita ad, but in real life, the trend has grown even stronger.
Kuusterä notes that the shift from a saving society to a consumer society has eliminated all differences between the banks.
Under the prevailing way of thinking, sources of growth are no longer investments alone - domestic demand also plays a role. Now banks have a surplus of liquidity, which means that it is more profitable for them to encourage people to spend rather than to save money.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 9.1.2006
The exhibition on a century of bank advertising is on display at the Money Museum of the Bank of Finland on Snellmanninkatu 2 in Helsinki. Opening hours are Tuesday-Thursday 12:00 - 6:00 PM, and on Saturday and Sunday, 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM.
KATRI KALLIONPÄÄ / Helsingin Sanomat
katri.kallionpaa@hs.fi
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| 16.1.2007 - THIS WEEK |
 Bank advertising evolves from promoting thrift to encouraging consumption |
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