Bashful HTC Focuses On “You” In New Ads

HTC is ready for its closeup. In a way. Advertisements debuting this week from the young smartphone brand place “You” front and center, with the HTC brand a solid second.

With ads running across 20 countries, the Taiwanese smartphone marks their first foray into advertising with the tagline, “You don’t need to get a phone. You need a phone that gets you.”

As part of their “Quietly Brilliant” brand positioning, the new campaign focuses on “You,” the consumer. Rather than technical capability or product specifics, the “You” campaign trumpets the emotional connections made possible through smartphones. The two television commercials are riveting, one shot from a phones-eye-view, portraying individuals from various walks of life using their phones for work, life and play.

But the relatively unknown brand should be more boisterous. Currently, their best performing models feature no branding by cellular providers. Consumers would never guess that the myTouch, Dash, or Wing – all offered by T-Mobile – are HTC products. The manufacturer has better branded their Hero phone through Sprint. If they expect the "You" campaign to garner greater brand awareness and market share, it will all be for naught without consistent branding through cellular providers.

Billboards erected for the campaign have led to some confusion. As PCWorld reports, billboards in LA reading “You” were confused with a similar ad campaign for Yahoo. HTC has begun to replace the “O” in “You” with a smartphone.

The overlap with the similar Yahoo campaign is poor timing. But HTC has executed the creative content of their ads far better than Yahoo. The Yahoo campaign presents itself as childish and dated, where the HTC campaign harnesses an untapped arena unseen by cellular providers: Emotion. The ad campaign allows consumer to assume that HTC phones already are the premier technology. The branding behind their “You” campaign allows consumers to envision their mundane, private and personal experiences made better by HTC.

The confluence of these two “You” campaigns brings to mind the Seinfeld episode where Jerry enters into a hasty engagement with a woman who he shares numerous interests and idiosyncrasies. The union quickly dissolves. When Jerry is asked why, he offers that the two were too much alike saying, “I can't be with somebody like me! I hate myself!"

While consumers may not be as self-loathing as the characters on Seinfeld, they respond better to aspirational models, and the chance to reinvent themselves with a new product. The “You” campaigns undermine that principle by offering a product that complements consumers just they way they are, rather than offer a product that will make them a better person: more responsive, better organized, less cluttered.