How Influencer Marketing Helps Huawei Build Its Brand

When I speak publicly about influencer marketing, I often ask the audience three questions:

• Can you name three Chinese brands?
• Can you pronounce Huawei’s name?
• Do you know what Huawei does?

The responses vary – and they reveal something about the state of Chinese brands generally, and of Huawei’s brand identity in particular.

China has created a solid handful of megabrands that are famous within its own borders. Many are related to social media, including Baidu, TenCent, and WeChat. Several Chinese companies have gone one step further and built global reputations: Lenovo made international headlines in 2005 when it bought the ThinkPad laptop business from IBM. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, is now pretty close to being a household name. Less well-known, but rising quickly, are DJI, the world’s largest maker of commercial drones, and Dalian Wanda, a property behemoth that bought US cinema chain AMC in 2012 and may soon acquire the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a popular mixed-martial arts franchise based in the United States.

Even so, a recent survey by Millward Brown, a consultancy, found that just 22% of consumers outside China could name a single Chinese brand. Knowing this, we were eager to learn what people knew about Huawei. So last year, we hired market research firm Penn Schoen Berland to conduct in-depth interviews with key opinion leaders (KOLs) around the world.

Huawei is a multinational company based in China, and a global leader in information and communications technology, or ICT. It’s the world’s largest maker of internet switching equipment and the #3 seller of smartphones after Samsung and Apple. Last year, we reported sales revenue of $60b. We employ 175,000 people in 170 countries. The point is, we’re not a small company. And in the ICT industry, many influential people do understand that Huawei matters. Unfortunately, a lot of them still don’t know much about what we actually do.

It’s not that we’re reclusive. Huawei has a corporate communications depart (which I lead) that handles outreach to both Chinese and international media around the world. We have teams that communicate with national governments, universities think tanks, , and industry associations. We host and attend tech-related events all over the world. But until recently, we had failed to connect with people who were not affiliated with any of those groups – but who still had influence.

The Penn Schoen Berland research showed high levels of awareness about Huawei, combined with shallow familiarity with our history, products, and company values. Executives in more developed markets thought of us mainly as a maker of network switching equipment, while those in developing markets knew us for our smartphones. Beyond that, they knew very little.

But they were curious. Penn Schoen Berland told us it was the first time interviewees had ever called them back to say, “Please tell us more about the company that commissioned this research.”

So we knew there were people who (a) were curious about Huawei, (b) were influential, and (c) didn’t fit into the normal “stakeholder” categories. We decided to launch a KOL program aimed directly at familiarizing them with Huawei.

Connections, made quickly

Influencer marketing isn’t a new concept. Getting the right people excited about your brand has always been one of the best ways to improve brand recognition. What is comparatively new is the ability to make connections quickly with people we don’t know. With social media and email, you can launch a direct marketing program overnight.

The industry sectors that started influencer marketing were consumer goods, luxury brands, travel, and food. The marketing was normally done on a “pay for play” basis: I’d mention your product if you gave me free samples, or flew me to a destination, or paid me directly. KOL marketing practices vary by region, and “pay for play” arrangements are still common. But increasingly, consumers are less influenced by endorsements if it’s obvious that the endorsements are paid for. Huawei’s influencer marketing is therefore only done on an unpaid basis.

Method to our madness

Huawei’s influencer marketing program categorizes KOLs according to how many followers they have on Facebook and Twitter, designating them as Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. We look for people who are either influential generally, or who have strong influence in specific areas such as cloud computing, safe cities, robotics, or fintech.

We target people who are neutral toward Huawei or favorably disposed to us – there’s no time to win over people who are negative. We do person-to-person contact, writing to KOLs directly for the initial outreach. If they write back, we set up a webinar and give them a “Huawei 101” presentation. Then we invite them to a conference or some other event, or we invite them to come tour our global headquarters in Shenzhen, China.

Sometimes we go to them. We’ve flown to the United States, Canada, and Australia to meet KOLs in person. It’s a way of saying “You matter to us,” and of finding out what their interests are.

The people we’re meeting are people who would have been overlooked by traditional government relations, analyst relations, or media outreach programs. They’re impressed that we’ve taken an interest in them, and they’re willing to share their knowledge and their time. They’re quite receptive, since we’re helping them increase their authority by expanding their familiarity with one of the world’s fastest-growing tech companies, and one of the few true multinationals to emerge from China. We’ve managed to get some really great KOLs on our list: John Battelle, one of the founders of WIRED; blogger and author Robert Scoble; David Weinberger, a writer and professor at Harvard University; and many more.

We’ve been running the KOL program for about a year, and the goal for Year 1 has really just been to understand the process, begin the outreach, and put metrics in place – to experiment and learn. We aim to engage a maximum of 80 people, each of whom has at least 30,000 followers. You really have to research who you’re speaking to, since people sometimes try to buy followers. There are tools, such as TwitterAudit, that tell you how many of a KOL’s followers are real. And there are sophisticated influencer management tools, such as Traackr, which help you assess not just the number of followers each KOL has, but the level of engagement followers have with an influencer. For example, do a KOL’s followers re-tweet or comment on the KOL’s messages and other content? 

Like other forms of corporate communications, influencer marketing is labor intensive. You have to:

• Identify the KOLs most relevant to your organization
• Get their attention
• Conduct activities and events that engage them
• Measure the return on your investment of time and money
• Monitor the KOLs’ activity relevant to your business

It becomes challenging to do one-on-one influencer marketing with more than about 80 KOLs. In fact, if the KOLs are sufficiently engaged (which is a good thing), the ideal number might be closer to 50.

To sum up: KOLs are a force multiplier for all corporate communications, and companies that fail to harness that force are missing a great opportunity to help build a following and reinforce a brand. Getting started in influencer marketing is relatively easy: identify a pool of target KOLs, research their interests and degree of influence, and start making those connections. Not all of them will be receptive, but many will be; and you will have a new set of allies who can help set your brand apart from the competition.

This piece originally appeared in Communication Director magazine: