Breaking news: Huawei living completely in their own fantasy world

The PR agency that represents Huawei Malaysia sent us an e-mail in response to our article on how they faked promo photos for their new P30. It goes:

“We’ve been made aware that there might have been some misunderstanding regarding our recent HUAWEI P30 Series teaser posters. We would like reiterate that those are, in fact, only teaser posters, and are only intended to hint at the unique new features that will come with the HUAWEI P30 Series. Huawei has acquired the licenses to the original images and the posters are artistic renditions of said features only.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank the media for their interest in our posters. We have much to announce in the coming weeks. Please stay tuned!”

The statement is basically the official statement from Huawei HQ regarding the issue, sent out to every news outlet that picked up on the story. What a load of bull!

Ads should always have proper disclaimers to avoid being misleading

The very fact that Huawei made this fix proves it. This is blatant deception. The biggest feature on the P30 is its superzoom ability and understandably, they’ve marketed it as such. However, when you take a stock image, magnify part of it, slap a large circle around the magnification and place a caption that says ‘Huawei P30 Series’ at the bottom, that is a direct reference to the new superzoom feature.  If that isn’t an implication that the photo was taken with a P30, I don’t know what is. Ad regulations are there for this exact reason, to fight deceptive marketing tactics. The sad part is, the cameras on their P series models are actually good. It’s almost as if it’s in the company’s identity to be compulsive liars.

Doing it the Huawei

If this doesn’t convince you that Huawei should be treated as persona non grata, try this on for size. In February 2018, accusations that it solicited fake reviews of their Mate 10 Pro were rife after they held a contest on their Facebook group. The contest urged users to explain why they want to own the Mate 10 Pro on Best Buy’s website for a chance to test the device. Surprise, surprise, it turned out that most of the 108 comments on Best Buy’s site turned into reviews, all detailing how the Mate 10 Pro is the best smartphone in the market. Mind you, the phone had yet to even be released at the time! Good try, Huawei. To add to that, they even started 2019 by firing one of their employees after he was arrested in Poland on spying charges. They should’ve fired their marketing team, to be honest.

Don’t get me wrong, Huawei is responsible for some of the best phones to enter the market in recent years. However, they’ve made a habit of lying about their devices and yet, most consumers continue to turn a blind eye to their dubious practices. At this point, i’m pretty sure Huawei just thinks that we’re all stupid. I mean, they sourced one of their pictures from Getty Images! Perhaps they’ll learn their lesson after this gaffe. I wouldn’t bet on it though.