According to data from GlobalWebIndex in 2015, men are the primary customers of Huawei, while women are more likely to own an iPhone. According to research institute IDC, Huawei’s phone is the top iPhone alternative in China. In fact, Chinese male users strongly supported Huawei in our informal survey last year, and some related Huawei to their best homemade smartphone brand to battle against Apple.
In 2017, men still use Huawei phones more than women, as Shao Yang, President of Cloud Services at Huawei’s Consumer Business Group pointed out on the Huawei Smartphone Open Day event held on May 16th.
“We divide their target group into gender and age. More and more high-end users are using Huawei, and there are more male users than female users. Most of them are older. We haven’t had great performance for younger female users, and we are now putting effort to increase our female user base,” Shao Yang told TechNode.
Huawei’s plan to get more women
Huawei’s first prong is to recruit more female employees to join their marketing team.
“Tech workers from 18 top tech companies are young, highly paid, and mostly male,” is the conclusion from the 2016 data from Payscales. Only one-third of the tech companies including eBay (43%), LinkedIn (42%), Samsung (37%), Facebook (32%), Apple (31%) and Google (30%) had more than 30% of women in their workforce.
Improving the company’s image is one thing, but female employment in marketing department could also help company’s device sales. Samsung attributes its initial Galaxy Note sales increase in 2012 to marketing effort done by its female marketing executive director, Kisun Kim, who worked in the South Korean company since 1990 (Korean source).
“Technology is the core of our brand, however, female users tend to put less emphasis on this. Plus, many of our engineers are men. We start from the root to change, and we encourage female users to join our marketing department,” Glory Cheung, CMO of the Huawei Consumer Business Group told TechNode. “We will pay attention to users’ daily life cycle to catch the opportunity to invite new users. Women these days are independent and have a strong mindset to control themselves, and it goes along with Huawei’s brand image.”
Huawei’s second prong is to push forward its partnership with Leica camera to appeal to female users. Huawei’s flagship P10’s dual camera, made in partnership with high-end camera-maker Leica, allows users to take high-quality selfies.
Taking selfies is more than just a cultural trend, it’s also a huge business: Meitu, maker of a photo beautifying app and phone, listed in Hong Kong Last year at a US$ 4 billion valuation. In China, you are exposed to huge smartphone advertisement on the streets and subway, featuring top star’s human-size picture with an advertising line that always mentions the camera’s capacity to take beautiful photos.