Apple stores around the world have always been architectural icons and tourist attractions, but it seems that Honor has decided to turn the facade of one of the most famous of these stores into its own free advertising billboard! In a scene that combines extreme boldness with what can be described as marketing “brazenness”, pictures have spread across Chinese social media showing a huge advertising truck belonging to Honor standing confidently in front of the Apple store on the famous “Canton Road” in Hong Kong, to promote its new Honor 600 series.
Colors and Words Game
Honor's campaign team didn't just park the truck; they chose slogans with clear and direct implications. The ad included the phrase "Orange to Orange," a play on the well-known English expression "Apples to Apples," used to describe comparing two things that are exactly the same. Instead of apples, Honor used oranges, alluding to the color of their new phone.
Ironically, the orange color the company is promoting bears a striking and uncanny resemblance to Apple's Cosmic Orange color for the iPhone 17 Pro. Honor seems to have no qualms about placing its iPhone-like phone, in both design and color, right in front of the official store, as if to say to the public: "Look, we have the same thing, just with a different logo!"
Between competition and cloning
Since splitting from Huawei in 2020 to avoid US sanctions, Honor has been striving to establish itself as an independent player. However, such publicity stunts sometimes reflect a lack of innovation; using a competitor's storefront as a backdrop for your ad isn't just guerrilla marketing; some might see it as a tacit admission that Apple is the standard everyone aspires to reach.
Apple, for its part, rarely gets drawn into such petty squabbles or makes a legal fuss over a parked truck, because responding would only give the competitor undeserved publicity. And as they say, imitation is the truest form of praise, and Apple receives plenty of that praise daily from companies that sometimes seem to operate in the "Apple Ideas Recycling" department.
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