Huawei Brand
Strategies and campaigns for one of the world’s most valuable brand*
My role: Chief Designer and Vice President, Huawei Consumer + Advisor to CMO
I have worked closely with Huawei’s Chief Marketing Officer, Glory Zhang, to advise Huawei about campaigns, branding, and marketing, especially typography and visual design, to redesign and refresh Huawei’s highly recognizable wordmark and other recognizable visual elements.
Huawei is the only Chinese company to feature in the annual ranking of the world’s Most Valuable Brands 2018 compiled by Forbes, ranking 79th with a brand value of US$ 8.4 billion.
The new wordmark in use
Huawei Global Flagship Store, the three-story single-family building, adopts the design concept of ‘City Square’, which combines the traditional Chinese and western architectural philosophy. The facade adopts a large area of high transmission glass with rounded corners, which feels like exquisite Glass Enamel.
From the Brand Brief:
Balance heritage and future focus. Drive premium perceptions among customers and partners. Simple but strong visual elements to tell a bigger, global brand story. Modern, digital & mobile are the first to adapt to the multi-media environment. More flexible to meet different audience needs and adapt to different scenarios.
Logo Audit
Aside from many cosmetic issues with the wordmark’s letters, the corporate logo looked too technical and futuristic, albeit only in the way people imagined futurism in the 1960s. The wordmark was set in Handel Gothic, a geometric sans-serif typeface, which was a companion typeface for the 1972 Warner Bros. logo and wordmark developed at Saul Bass’ studios. Therefore, the previous Huawei logo lacked timelessness as one important and desirable core attribute, too.
Brand Exploration
While we were able to simplify the corporate wordmark, satisfy the design brief and address all cosmetic issues as outlined in the audit, we were unfortunately not able to push the brand’s other visual elements as far as we hoped — as shown in the mockups above. The element that looks like a rising sun or flower (the new identity tends to omit it on some of its devices, such as the P series) hasn’t changed as much.
In our “radical” proposal (above), we suggested that Huawei Consumer could use simplified and more symmetrical teardrop-shaped petals for the “flower” element instead of its stylized ones. The more simplified shapes could have been arranged in any form or fashion, allowing for engaging visuals, especially animations. As shown (above): two petals can make a heart, several more a clover or a flower, and so on.
I worked with the Chief Marketing officer on a number of projects, including the releases of new products. Pictured are the very successful campaigns of the P-series release with the Leica camera.
Huawei has signed up Scarlett Johansson and Henry Cavill to appear in their European campaign for its P9 smartphone. The teaser was unveiled in the U.K. at an event held by Huawei in partnership with camera brand Leica, whose technology is used in their phones.
P series Campaign
For the release of the P-series in April of 2016, we created a campaign to create curiosity for Huawei’s upcoming release: Huawei tasked Scarlett Johansson and Henry Cavill to spearhead its Leica-branded P9 smartphone to boost its brand recognition in the West.
To announce its new flagship smartphones, the P9 and P9 Plus, at a launch event in London in partnership with camera company Leica, we created a teaser for the ad campaign in cooperation with Havas London, which was aired at the show and subsequently published on posters and billboards throughout Asia and Europe.
Dream it Possible
I worked with Wondros and Huawei to create the brand anthem film for Huawei: here is the backstory.