Be a Huawei Creator

Flipping the script for Huawei

When Huawei first launched in the UK, the brand had several challenges to overcome – not least how it positioned itself to younger Gen Z audiences. Huawei was a relatively unknown brand with a difficult name to pronounce, and a range of products that appeared confusing to consumers in a landscape where Apple and Samsung dominated. It’s brief to us was to source what it called student ‘Ambassadors’ at Universities up and down the country, to give them access to products free of charge, in the hope that they would then influence their immediate sphere of influence.

This pitch opportunity meant that to win the work, we’d have to do something different. With the client ask feeling underwhelming, I pitched a new and alternative approach to the project – which would go on to win the work, and imporve our relationship with Huawei as a creative and content agency.

The idea was simple – instead of simply gifting products and crossing fingers, we’d open up a well rounded competition, that we would tour to top Universities in order to recruit as many people to a new competition as possible, raising general vision of the brand and opening up opportunities to tour locations with a view to raise awareness of the bran, it’s products and just why Huawei smartphones are a real competitor to the big brands the market already knew and loved.

The creative direction was not so simple, and was intentionally disruptive and unique, different to the Huawei brand that young people recognised. The intentions was to look and feel abstract – like a dream or blurry vision of the creative arts.

Huawei Creators was a competition that would tour 4 key University location art and creative faculties, to specifically recruit creators to the brand. Creators would tell us, in a pop up event booth, through recorded application films that were captured on Huawei tablets, just why they should win the mantel of Huawei Creator' – and the swathes of free Huawei products and connectivity that would fuel their year at University, that would inspire them and give them the technology to realise their aspirations.

This new approach and new name ‘Huawei Creators’, would need International approval from C level Huawei staff in China, along with brand teams that heavily controlled the brand from overseas. The project opened doors to new projects with Huawei and the then Purple Agency. Other similar projects included roadshows to network providers like EE, where we would educate the sales departments through experiential and events that would highlight specific features of the phone, making them exciting and tangible for them to sell.