If you google terms like celebrity advertisement trust and credibility
Most of what you'll find is opinion pieces and studies trying to prove why advertisement with celebrities doesn't work because people
Fundamentally don't trust these ads if you add Huawei to your search terms though
You'll also find that the company doesn't seem to listen to the advice. I'm Martin from tech out
Are you watching the thirty second episode of the story behind series and let me explain why?
So Huawei has one of the largest
Portfolios of celebrity endorsements ever wonder woman gal gadot herself is the chief experience officer?
And if you're a little confused by the title don't worry
It's corporate speak for we paid her to say nice things about us before that too scholar Johnson and Superman Henry Cavill
Are the faces of the Huawei p9?
Supermodel Karlie Kloss was everywhere promoting the Huawei watch and even before that
Footballer superstar Lionel Messi promoted phones like the Huawei mate 8 there are many others, too
but these are all tier 1 celebrities and Huawei couldn't have found anyone much more expensive to make ant with even if they tried and
Here's why that seems a little confusing at first
According to market researchers at comrades only 17% of British adults found celebrity
Endorsements a trustworthy source of information which was by far the lowest score compared to the other scores they measured I gave the same question
to my subscribers in the little poll on YouTube
And you people brought that number down all the way to 3 percent. Good job
Everyone and to top it off market researchers at Collective bias also found that only 3 percent of consumers
Claimed to consider buying a product because it was recommended by a celebrity
And I mean none of this should come as a surprise right we all know that
Celebrities just say whatever the hell they're paid to say and yet here
We are stuck with ads that according to the internet and according to common sense just shouldn't work, but for huawei
They do and to understand why let's put huawei into context a little found that in
1987 in China Huawei first became successful by manufacturing
Telecommunications equipment like network switches and routers and to this day
It is one of the dominant players in this field
Serving internet providers and mobile carriers around the world from China to Europe and even Australia
strong and
existing business
Relationships with mobile carriers ended up being the perfect sales channel to bring huawei branded phones to the market especially in Western countries where most
people buy phones from their carriers
I mean Huawei was supplying carriers with all their networking hardware anyway, so they might as well to start selling Huawei phones, too
Right convenient, but at the same time
How we had an uphill battle to fight back in the early days their phones were simply pulled bad
I had a hallway phone in
2011 when I was a student in China and let me tell you it was
Absolute garbage even my Chinese friends told me that it was a poor man's phone and then there was the brand
Huawei is one of the only consumer facing brands from China with big international ambitions that openly embraces being Chinese
Unlike most others like Lenovo DJI Oppo and oneplus which all sound and feel somehow
I don't know man international Huawei has a distinctly Chinese name and the 100% Chinese upper management team and board of directors
It is notorious for having Chinese
expats in senior positions abroad instead of hiring local people
And it has a long history with the Chinese government
the founder of Huawei Zhang Zhang Fame came from the Chinese military how he had multiple joint ventures with the government built most of the
Telecommunications network for the People's Liberation Army was promoted as a national champion by the government and routinely builds networks for foreign countries
especially around Africa as a part of China's foreign policy initiatives in other words allow a is as close to the Chinese government and
China as a theoretically privately owned company can be now
I'll leave it up to you to decide if that is a good or a bad thing
But it certainly makes things harder for a company that is trying to establish a new consumer brand in the West
The country brand of China isn't the greatest now if you don't know at least in this context
Country brand means the intrinsic values that consumers attach to a company or a brand
Just for being from a specific country
You know food from Italy is probably tasty cars from Japan are probably reliable
Craftsmanship from Switzerland is probably excellent, and so on until recently if China's country brand has been perceived as low-quality
Copycat products possibly with privacy, and I'm not saying that these are correct
But they are the assumptions that people have
Generally not a very positive country brand which is why the others usually avoid appearing to Chinese and choose to build an international
Something brand instead tois way for whatever reasons though
Just decided to embrace it which directly leads to a few branding challenges the first goal of any brand is to be memorable
After all if you don't remember it what is the point and?
As it turns out Huawei as a name is a little hard for people outside of China to wrap their heads around it fun fact
There are multiple videos from foreign branches of the company trying to correct people's hilarious pronunciations
And
Best of all is that in all of those videos the hosts themselves mispronounce the name of their company -
It's not actually Huawei because the age is pronounced pretty clearly and Mandarin Chinese so the correct pronunciation would be
Huawei, so good job on getting your own brand name wrong
But let's also take a look at the fist Jem from the South African team
So because we can't say the word we decided to learn through sounds
Using everyday and not so everyday objects
Okay, no wonder that most people
I know who aren't phone nerds are completely confused by the name and while all of that is genuinely funny. It does highlight
How being memorable is a challenge for a Chinese brand like Huawei the second goal of a brand is to evoke a sense of familiarity?
Why because evolution has taught us to trust things that are familiar stuff and people you have had around you for a long time
Hasn't killed you so far
So they're probably safe, but everything new and unfamiliar could be a source of danger
So we subconsciously dislike and distrust it
This is why we all seem to think that our own country
Our own religion and our own mums cooking is the best there is in the world
And it is also why American ads can feel like a diversity competition sometimes all the skin colors must be represented if my brain identifies
Someone in the ad that looks like me
It said consciously puts me into a state of cognitive ease if you want to know more about this topic
There's a video going into much more detail in the description of this video, but long story short
Huawei by virtue of being so very Chinese
feels foreign and not familiar to most people in the West and the third and last
Real goal of a brand is to promote something
Positive about a company and once again when how I entered the consumer market all that conveyed to people was if it was a Chinese
Phone maker and given China's country brand that wasn't exactly positive so Huawei at first had good sales channels
But we products and a weak brand you know what they had though money and big ambitions first
They had a gigantic and very profitable existing business selling networking equipment and second
they reportedly also have very generous support from the Chinese government because of how the government sees Huawei as
Instrumental for building China's country brand and soft power abroad so when a company has so much money
ambition and the backing of a giant government being cost effective
Just isn't necessarily the goal having the biggest possible impact and the fastest possible growth is which
Conveniently brings us to celebrity endorsements
They are not cost effective that is what all these blogs and surveys bemoan if you are a lean startup
Or a super efficient corporation with low margins, maybe don't use them
But despite what the survey say. They are ultimately still effective see these numbers on the internet are misleading because they're all
Self-reported the problem with advertisement is that we all think it doesn't affect us when in reality
It does when we see an ad with a celebrity
We might not drop all of our things and run to a store to buy a phone
But it does manipulate our minds in a couple of important way that Huawei needs it to
First it makes a brand or a product more memorable people won't remember a Chinese name by itself
But they will remember the face of the celebrity so ha we can simply put by memorability
Second is familiarity
Remember people don't tend to trust foreign stuff slap a few familiar faces on the products though and people will be like oh, yeah
I'm comfortable with this person so by extension. I'm comfortable with this brand now - that's cognitive easing at work
If there it is positive brand associations
And it is proven that people subconsciously associate perceived qualities of a celebrity with the brand that they promote so once again
celebrities for the rescue in other words celebrities are the perfect solution to hallways original branding problems
But an improved brand doesn't sell products by itself so Huawei also spent an enormous amount of money making their phones much better than they
Were and they of course also have a bunch of other marketing activities
So while celebrity endorsements might not be very cost-effective
For a company like Huawei that has more money and bigger branding challenges than most of its competitors
It might be the right first step all right, so how do you feel about celebrity endorsements now?
There's a Twitter poll which you can find in the description of this video so cast your votes over there
Tweet at me because I love reading all of your tweets if you want to see more videos like this one then
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