What a tech client’s PR Campaign Taught Me About Humanising Technology

In mid 2020, Huawei was facing a difficult communications environment.

COVID-19 had created growing suspicion toward Chinese companies in many markets. At the same time, tensions between the United States and China were already shaping how Chinese technology brands were being perceived by the rest of the world.

The problem was no longer simply whether Huawei’s technology was capable.

It was also about whether people felt comfortable working with the company behind it.

Huawei wanted a public-relations campaign that would improve how people viewed the brand.

The brief was not just to showcase products or explain technical achievements. It was to make the company feel more open, relatable and human.

Our team developed a proposal for a travelling pop-up exhibition built around three creative directions:

• Many Voices, One Frequency

• We Colour Your World

• From Heart-ware to Hardware

We eventually won the pitch, beating other more prestigious agencies.

But, as with many plans developed during that period, what happened next was very different from what anyone had originally expected.

The real challenge

The visible challenge was negative public perception. But the deeper problem was emotional distance.

Huawei was widely seen as a large technology corporation. People knew about its mobile phones, its technological prowess, its networks and engineering capabilities, but they did not necessarily know the people, motivations and human stories behind the technology.

When trust is weak, explaining more technical features rarely solves the problem.

The facts may answer questions, but they do not always reduce suspicion.

The strategic challenge was therefore not:

How do we tell people Huawei has advanced technology?

Rather, it was:

How do we help people see the human purpose, effort and ambition behind that technology?

The strategic choice

We chose to move the story away from hardware alone and towards the people behind it.

The idea was to show technology as something created by human passion, perseverance, 

curiosity and cooperation.

The strongest expression of this was:

Hardware powered by Heart-ware

The proposal argued that while people admired the speed of technological progress, fewer recognised the human determination that made it possible and the lives it had touched. 

It described “heart-ware” as the passion, perseverance and adventurous spirit behind innovation.This allowed Huawei to speak about technology without making technology the only hero.The human subjects in the narrative had become the heroes.

Another concept, Many Voices, One Frequency, approached the same problem through communication. 

It recognised that different cultures and perspectives can be driven apart by misunderstanding, and positioned Huawei as a means of lowering communication barriers and bringing people closer together.

The campaign was therefore not built around proving that Huawei was bigger, faster or more technologically advanced.

It was built around emphasizing the connection between tech and people.

How it was originally meant to come to life

The original proposal had translated those ideas into a physical and digital exhibition experience.

One activation was the Message Tree, where visitors from different cities across the globe could record greetings in their native languages. Those messages would appear on an online social wall and could later be replayed and viewed by visitors when the exhibition moved on to another country.

The concept turned communication into something visible and participatory. 

People were not merely being told that Huawei connected the world. 

They were taking part in that connection themselves.

Other proposed elements included:

• stories from Huawei employees about innovation;

• creative-thinking and technology workshops;

• live online conversations with key Huawei personnel;

• virtual galleries featuring Huawei projects and milestones;

• social-sharing tools that allowed visitors to extend the experience beyond the exhibition

The aim was to give the public greater access to the people, stories and motivations behind the company.

Instead of saying, “Trust us,” the experience tried to create the conditions in which trust could begin to form.

When circumstances changed

After we won the pitch, COVID restrictions became more severe.

Venues could no longer operate as planned, travel had become difficult, and physical locations and proposed exhibition spaces were affected by lockdowns and public-safety restrictions.

The travelling pop-up exhibition could not proceed in its original form at that point in time.

So the campaign changed to become a purely online one.

Instead of trying to force the physical exhibition to work under impossible circumstances, the idea was adapted into an online campaign.

The focus remained the same: humanising Huawei’s technology.

Instead of inviting people into an exhibition space, the campaign showcased human stories of how its technologies that had helped people in their daily lives.

The technology was still present, but it was no longer presented mainly through boring tech specifications, product displays or engineering claims.

It was shown through the stories of real people and how technology had made a practical difference to their lives.

This mattered because the strategic idea was never dependent on the exhibition structure itself.

The venue was only one possible expression of the idea.

The deeper idea was that Huawei technology should be understood through the human lives it touched.

When the physical format disappeared, that core narrative of human connections still remained.

The lessons

There were two important lessons from this experience.

The first was about reputation.

When a company has a perception problem, it is tempting to respond with more corporate messaging such as press releases, more statistics and more claims.

But distrust is rarely solved by increasing the volume of communication.

When people feel distant from a brand, the answer may be to reduce that distance.

Show the people, explain the purpose, tell the stories about how actual lives had been improved

.

Make the organization easier to understand. Put a human face on a monolithic entity.

Technology companies often focus heavily on what their products can do. But when public perception becomes the challenge, people also want to understand who is creating that technology, why it exists and how it improves real lives of real people.

The second lesson was about adaptability.

A strong strategy should not collapse simply because one execution becomes impossible.

The physical exhibition had to be abandoned, but the central idea survived because it was based on a human truth rather than a particular format.

The format changed from a pop-up exhibition to an online storytelling campaign.

The strategy remained the same.

The Clarity Principles takeaway

PR distributes a message. Strategy determines what the message should be, why people should believe it, and how it should come to life.

That was the real work behind this campaign. The visible output was a PR campaign, but the thinking began much earlier: identifying the source of the reputational distance, finding the human truth that could reduce it, and building an idea that could survive even when the original execution had to change.

When technology creates distance, human stories must bring people closer.

And there is another principle I took from the experience:

A strong strategy can survive a change in execution.

Venues may close, budgets may change and markets may shift.

Unexpected events may make the original plan impossible to execute.

But when the underlying strategic idea is clear, it can be expressed in another form without losing its meaning.

The technology explains how something works, but the human story explains why anyone should care.

And clarity ensures that when circumstances change, the idea still knows where it needs to go.

Start a conversation with us...

Disclaimer: This article reflects my personal recollection and professional interpretation of the project. Certain details have been simplified or omitted to respect client confidentiality. The views expressed are my own and do not represent Huawei or any other organization involved. Brand names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.