Apple stores around the world have long been architectural icons and tourist attractions, but it seems Honor has decided to turn the facade of one of the most famous of these stores into its own free billboard! In a scene that combines extreme boldness with what could be described as marketing “audacity,” photos have circulated on Chinese social media showing a massive Honor advertising truck parked confidently in front of the Apple Store on the famous Canton Road in Hong Kong, promoting its new Honor 600 series.
A game of colors and words
Those behind the Honor campaign didn’t just stop at parking the truck; they chose slogans with clear and direct hints. The ad included the phrase “Orange to Orange,” a play on the famous English idiom “Apples to Apples,” which is used to refer to comparing two perfectly equivalent things. Instead of apples, Honor used oranges in reference to the color of its new phone.
The ironic part here is that the orange color the company is promoting bears a strange and suspicious resemblance to the Cosmic Orange color introduced by Apple in the iPhone 17 Pro. It seems Honor found no embarrassment in placing its phone—which resembles the iPhone in both design and color—opposite the original store, as if to say to the public: “Look, we have the same thing but with a different logo!”
Between competition and cloning
Since Honor’s separation from Huawei in 2020 to avoid US sanctions, it has been striving to prove itself as an independent player. However, such promotional stunts sometimes reflect a lack of innovation; using a competitor’s store as a backdrop for your ad is not just “guerrilla marketing,” but some might see it as a tacit admission that Apple is the standard everyone aspires to reach.
Apple, for its part, rarely gets dragged into such petty conflicts or creates legal noise over a parked truck, because responding would give the competitor extra fame they don’t deserve. As the saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Apple receives plenty of this flattery daily from companies that sometimes seem to be operating in an “Apple ideas recycling” department.
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