Star Product Campaigning: Maximizing Partners’ Business Growth

2019 was an extraordinary year for Huawei. The sanctions imposed by the US pushed Huawei to its limits. Yet under extreme pressure, we are even more dedicated to building world-leading products and solutions, and we continue to work with global partners to serve global customers. In the enterprise market, we launched a series of star product campaigns, such as those for the AirEngine Wi-Fi 6 and OceanStor Dorado products. We focused on the most competitive products and worked with partners to carry out online and offline precision marketing, quickly boosting global sales.

According to a report by Dell’Oro Group, Huawei ranked number one in the global WLAN market (excluding North America) in 2019 Q3. Concerning Huawei’s Wi-Fi 6 pipeline sales, 420,000 Access Points (APs) were sold by 2019 Q4. According to Gartner’s report on global storage market share in 2019 Q3, Huawei boasted the highest revenue growth rate of 42.3 percent in the primary storage market, with the revenue growth of all-flash products exceeding 100 percent.

Every bit of our growth is a sign of customers’ recognition of Huawei’s value and a result of close collaboration between Huawei and our partners. With trust from our customers and support from partners, we feel fearless going forward, despite grave external challenges continuing in 2020. We shall focus more on star product campaigning with more mature and precise operations. We also hope to work with more global partners to carry out joint marketing. Together, we will leverage star product campaigning to boost market space, promote sales, maximize the business growth of our partners, and achieve greater business success.

New Marketing Tactics: Creative 2B Marketing Based on Marketing 3.0

There are two types of marketing: 2B and 2C marketing. 2C marketing can stimulate a huge amount of impulsive consumption, while enterprise procurement (2B marketing) is more rational, featuring long decision-making cycles and high trial-and-error costs. In addition, 2B marketing faces challenges, such as few marketing channels, difficulty in precision targeting, and high customer acquisition costs.

After more than a year of exploration and practice, we have worked with many overseas partners to successfully launch a number of star product campaigns outside China, overcoming various 2B marketing obstacles. We have developed a set of effective and replicable marketing 3.0 tactics that encompass four phases:

• Phase 1 — Awareness: Quickly build a 0-to-1 perception among target audiences with vigorous marketing through all marketing channels, as well as testimonials from authoritative KOLs and customers. This phase is characterized by vigorous marketing through all channels at the same pace.
• Phase 2 — Interest: Emphasize the unique strengths of our products and challenge customers to test our products in order to stimulate their interest.
• Phase 3 — Desire: Publicize the success cases and customer benefits of our products in specific industries, and compare our products with those of our competitors in order to stimulate customers’ desire to purchase. This phase requires accuracy, and precision marketing needs to be performed based on the profile, journey and location of customers.
• Phase 4 — Action: Drive customer actions through promotions and face-to-face marketing. This phase features stability and effective conversion of business value.

In addition to different phases, various marketing channels also play different roles. Here are some examples:

• “Reading customers’ minds” in digital marketing: It is very important to understand what customers think. In the past, we read customers’ minds based on experience. However, now, in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we can read customers’ minds by analyzing their online behavior. For example, if a target audience searches for keywords such as “Wi-Fi” or “Network” online, the audience may be in the awareness phase. If an audience searches for a brand or product/solution name, or watches related product videos online, it may be in the interest phase. By identifying and analyzing these behaviors, we can determine corresponding marketing strategies for certain audiences.
• Airport ads are mainly used to build awareness among potential customers by letting them know about a certain new product. However, airport ads are not enough to drive customers to make a purchase.
• An important objective of offline precision marketing activities, is to guide PoC tests. In 2019, we held an IP Club activity in Japan, which yielded four PoC opportunities. We also held three IP Club events in South Africa, leading to 12 PoC opportunities.

Furthermore, different types of products require different online and offline investment proportions. For example, Wi-Fi 6 marketing is similar to 2C marketing and requires 50-50 division of online and offline marketing investment. Products like data center switches require more offline investment, so the ratio of online investment to offline investment can be set at 1:19.

Four World-Leading Products: AirEngine Wi-Fi 6, OceanStor Dorado, UPS + SmartLi, and OptiXtrans DC908

Star product campaigning must be focused on powerful, top-class products. We believe only top-class and industry-leading products that will really impress customers should be campaigned as star products. In 2020, we will use the new-generation products of AirEngine Wi-Fi 6, OceanStor Dorado, UPS + SmartLi, and OptiXtrans DC908 and work with our partners to achieve shared success.

• AirEngine Wi-Fi 6

With a profound understanding of 5G technologies, Huawei leads the development of Wi-Fi 6. According to certification from leading testing institution Tolly, Huawei’s AirEngine Wi-Fi 6 AP has the highest single-radio rate of 3.8 Gbit/s in the industry, 1 Gbit/s faster than the second-ranking AP. The new-generation AirEngine Wi-Fi 6 AP released this year is the industry’s first Wi-Fi 6 AP that supports 16 x 16 Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO), delivering a rate of up to 10.75 Gbit/s, setting a new record for the industry. The powerful throughput performance enables AirEngine Wi-Fi 6 to provide ultra-fast wireless access and seamless roaming in enterprise office, production, and public service scenarios. We believe that AirEngine Wi-Fi 6 will change the productivity of enterprises and improve their competitive advantages.

• OceanStor Dorado

The next-generation OceanStor Dorado uses the end-to-end Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) architecture and is embedded with five Huawei-developed chips for transmission, computing, storage, management, and intelligence, achieving an ultra-low latency of 0.1 ms. According to the SPC-1 test model, OceanStor Dorado supports 20 million Input/output Operations Per Second (IOPS), the highest in the industry. Based on the industry’s unique SmartMatrix architecture, OceanStor Dorado can still work even if seven of its eight controllers fail, ensuring zero service interruption. OceanStor Dorado is the best choice for scenarios with databases, VMware virtualization, and large-scale Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment.

• UPS + SmartLi

In the digital era, all enterprise data centers need Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) and batteries to protect services. Huawei’s UPS adopts a unique modular design, supports hot swap of all key components, and occupies 30+ percent less space compared to the industry average. The maintenance and capacity expansion of the UPS takes only five minutes. According to the third-party TUV test, the online working efficiency of Huawei UPS is 97 percent, the highest in the world. In terms of the global modular UPS market share, Huawei has ranked number one in the industry for four consecutive years. Huawei’s new-generation lithium battery, SmartLi, has a battery life two-to-three times longer than that of traditional lead-acid batteries. SmartLi is 70 percent lighter and occupies 70 percent less space, realizing a minimal TCO throughout the lifecycle. In the past, the biggest challenge for enterprises in building equipment rooms was the bearing capacity of the rooms, with batteries placing the highest demand on the bearing capacity. With Huawei’s UPS and lithium batteries, any office rooms can be turned into equipment rooms. SmartLi uses the unique active current equalization technology and supports mixed use of old and new batteries, maximizing battery utilization and prolonging battery life. SmartLi also ensures stable system running when a single module is damaged.

• OptiXtrans DC908

Huawe i has been a leader in the optical communications field for 12 years. Huawei’s OptiXtrans DC908 is customized for enterprise data center scenarios, and is the most intelligent data center interconnection product with the highest capacity density in the industry. OptiXtrans DC908 supports automatic configuration and predictive maintenance, and no special technical capabilities are required to install this product.

Maximizing Partners’ Business Growth Through Joint Marketing

With effective marketing tactics and powerful star products, we also need to work closely with global partners. In 2019, we provided comprehensive support for channel partners based on promotional activities, driving their business growth.

As the New Year begins, we have already developed plans, milestones, and key actions for star product campaigns. Support materials such as advertisements, videos, cloud demos, and white papers are also being released. We hope that our partners can select appropriate star products, develop the objectives and cooperation plans for joint marketing with Huawei, and align our ideas and pace to achieve effective marketing collaboration in the New Year. Considering the volatility of the market and the complexity of joint 2B marketing, we will conduct benchmarking with channel partners’ marketing personnel through webinars every quarter to ensure information consistency between Huawei and partners.

Next, I want to offer our partners some key suggestions on marketing:

• In terms of marketing activities, we hope that our partners be more proactive in hosting and participating in Huawei’s IP Club and IT Day events. We will invite more customers to take part in Huawei’s key marketing activities such as MWC and HC. Partners are also encouraged to be more proactive in attending Huawei’s training sessions.
• The official website is an important platform for joint marketing. In 2019, 105 of our global partners released star product advertisements on their official websites. In 2020, we expect more partners to place advertisements on AirEngine Wi-Fi 6, OceanStor Dorado, UPS + SmartLi, and OptiXtrans DC908 on their official websites, with Huawei’s logo attached.
• EDM is also an important means of online marketing. In 2020, we will develop more EDMs for star products. We hope that partners can make the most of these resources and push them to customers.

Huawei is ready to work closely with more global partners to carry out joint marketing. Together, we will use star product campaigning to boost market space, promote sales, maximize the business growth of our partners, and achieve greater business success.