The Two Logics of the “Lion Rock Spirit” Re-Represented by FortunePharmHK’s Branding Television Commercial

Abstract

In 2015, FortunePharmHK produced a branding television commercial (TVC) using the core concepts and values of Hong Kong locality and the “Lion Rock spirit” to align its brand identity with the local culture and civic identity. This chapter examines FortunePharmHK’s use of locality and local identity discourses to create a mythology for the brand and for Hong Kong with the Lion Rock spirit and the Hongkonger identity. The local pharmacy rearticulates identity politics and discourses through symbolic interactions with both older and younger generations of Hongkongers, whose two different logics and discourses of Lion Rock and Hong Kong reveal the differences and similarities in a reflexive process of Hong Kong people’s multifaceted, flexible identifications. On the one hand, the narrations and narratives of different generations in the commercial understate the differences and antagonism between these two logics, and between older and younger generations; on the other, they symbolically help to bridge the generational gaps that have been exaggerated by digital media-enabled social movements such as the Umbrella Movement in 2014. In the TVC, the brand aligns the pharmacy’s experience of hardships with the older generation and extends its brand mission and vision with the motto of “always going one step further” to synchronize with the hope and passion of the younger generation. The resemiotizations of these logics through multimodal semiotics of visual design, characterization, copywriting, and storytelling create a new myth of the Lion Rock spirit in which the older generation shows its understanding and support toward the younger generation’s uncompromising struggle for the right to decide their future through autonomy and self-determination. FortunePharmHK attempted to encourage Hongkongers to think positively, according to what is known as the Lion Rock spirit, in line with the brand’s persistent support of the health and life of Hong Kong people since its foundation in 1954. The selected cast and storyline of different generations of Hongkongers in this emotional and appealing identity-based branding TVC present a complex story for the brand and for Hong Kong, thus strengthening its brand identity through the notion of locality, or bentu, amidst the rise of localism and local identity discourses.