Did Huawei take the term "marketing copy" a little too literally?
Huawei is yet to offer a defence of, or explanation for, its apparent wholesale copying of an NSN marketing document.
A widely-seen blogpost by NSN's own media department laid out NSN's case, and drew attention to similarities in the two documents' structure, visuals, and certain elements of text (mainly headings). The documents in question can be downloaded here and here — both refer to the companies' consultancy capabilities.
Mobile Europe approached Huawei's press representative on Thursday 24 May asking it to account for the apparent similarities between the NSN flier, published in 2011, and Huawei's own consulting practices flier distributed this year. Despite the best efforts of the vendor's PR agency, the only response we have received so far is: "Huawei is aware of the matter and is looking into it".
Although on one level this looks like a minor matter – perhaps someone in a marketing department somewhere pressed on deadlines and short of ideas – I asked Huawei to comment because its consultants are very poorly served by such a slapdash marketing effort. Why should customers trust the consultancy practice if it can't even appear to structure its own marketing output, I asked?
So far, then, no answer, although to be fair we were told there could be a more detailed response in the course of this week.