Hua-lau-wei!
We get it. The pressure to come up with a compelling National Day promotion is real. National Day promo’s are always great— Not only do you get to parade your “patriotism”, but as a foreign company, you also assert your commitment to investment in the country you’ve set up shop in.
With Singapore celebrating it’s 54th birthday on August 9th, Huawei came up with the brilliant idea to price their Y6 Pro 2019 devices at a promotional price of S$54. The catch? The promotion is applicable only to Singapore citizens and permanent residents aged 50 and above as of Dec 31 this year.
Regardless, that is a GREAT deal. Of course, not everything went to according to plan. With that in mind, here’s how NOT to execute a promotion, courtesy of Huawei Singapore 🙂
Completely forget that senior citizens are.. well, senior citizens
So many elderly queuing for Huawei Y6 Pro. Some even queued up since 2am!#huawei #Y6Pro #scam #singapore pic.twitter.com/7FINs11tCs
— All Singapore Stuff (@allsgstuff) July 26, 2019
With the announcement of such a sweet deal, of course people were bound to wait in line overnight, as is the norm these days. Usually, that would be fine but in this case, is it really okay to instigate a situation that leads to hundreds of 50 something’s waiting in line for hours?
Perhaps Huawei thought that being senior citizens, they couldn’t possibly have it in them to ACTUALLY wait in line..right? ha ha. Wrong. EVERYONE loves a good deal, regardless of how old you are. Droves of people over 50 ended up lining up from as early as 4 am for a chance to snag themselves a Y6 Pro.
Never disrespect your seniors!
Solution: Make it clear that there is only going to be 20-30 units per store, thus discouraging long ass lines. Think about it. You see the line, count how many people are in it, if it reaches 30, you get on out of there and on to the next store. QUICK MATH.
Be bad at Math and/or critical thinking
Speaking of math, Huawei Allocated a maximum of 2 phones per person.
Um, hello.. Why would you do that??? I mean, it looks great on paper and all but do senior citizens REALLY need 2 phones? Okay, maybe its situational. Fair enough. However, if you’re going to clearly state that only 2 devices will be allocated per person, that kind of implies that there is going to be a bunch of phones allocated for the SGD 54 promo, doesn’t it?
Lets do the MaTh here, you have about 30 devices per store. Assuming people snap up 2 devices each.. that leaves you with enough phones for.. 400 customers per store. wE GoT tHiS.
Solution: I don’t know, maybe allocate more units per store? Or perhaps, limit it to 1 unit per customer? But again, what do I know, right.
Set a promotion period that defies logic
Okay, so it’s safe to say that Huawei knew that there would be 30 odd units available per store. Why on earth would they specify that the promo runs for “3 days only” like as if they’ve allocated a 500 units per store?
Did they also estimate that they would sell about 10 units per store over the course of the weekend?
Please just press play on the video below and listen to Jai from KL gangster for 2 seconds for my exact thoughts (Anything longer than 2 seconds and it just wont make sense. Dont say I didn’t warn you!).
Solution: At this point, just go back to school.
Fail to include the important details
Given their dubious history with important disclaimers, should it come as any surprise that Huawei failed to add one stating that there will be limited stock available? I mean honestly, just like the previous incident, all this could have been avoided had they included a few extra words in the fine print.
Solution: The devil’s in the details! Always include disclaimers my friends, always!!
As you can probably tell, all the solutions are pretty much just me stating the obvious. To be fair to Huawei though, they did apologize for their gaffe.
Sorry no use. Give us phones! #huawei #y6Pro #marketingfail pic.twitter.com/OXcFZXsGH8
— All Singapore Stuff (@allsgstuff) July 26, 2019
However, in this Twitter users infinite wisdom though, Sorry no use!
I am now convinced that Huawei are very much invested in the notion that any publicity is good publicity, so perhaps this is all part of their plan. I really don’t think incurring the wrath of Singaporeans is the way to do it though. Oh well..