Lenovo Group Ltd. (PINX: LNVGY), one of the largest Chinese computer hardware manufacturer, pulled off a daring prank in order to get consumers interested in its latest Yoga 3 Pro ultra-thin convertible laptop device. The company hired the help of the Upright Citizens Brigade to act as Lenovo employees in the Plymouth Meeting Mall. The fake Lenovo employees changed the Yoga 3 Pro computer into a tablet, then attempted the same with a MacBook Air. However, the Apple device broke right in front of the eyes of several shoppers, and the fake employees began to argue on whose fault it was for the damage.
After the act, the faux Lenovo employee handed the broken MacBook Air to one of the shoppers nearby and just walked away. However, before customers managed to walk away, a real Lenovo employee showed up on the scene to explain things, along with attempting to sell the idea of the Yoga 3 Pro.
The Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro is a beautiful device with decent hardware specifications to boot. The device comes packed with Intel Core M processor running at1.1GHz, a 13.3-inch display pixel resolution of 3200 x1800 and 8GB of RAM. Furthermore, it has an impressive 256GB of solid-state drive on the inside, along with Windows 8.1 x64.
Bob Cordell, a digital marketing manager at Lenovo, said that his company is always trying to come up with innovative ways to get new devices out there and into the minds of consumers. Though, we must ask the question, was this stunt successful or was it a major fail?
“Whenever you attack Apple the Mac faithful will rise up in inflamed protest but they’d never buy your product anyway,” says Rob Enderle, an analyst from the Enderle group. “But they will help dive your campaign viral because their non-Mac friends love to rub their faces in stuff like this and the madder they get, the more the ad propagates. So this actually seems to be working rather well.”
No doubt many Apple fans will take to various sections of the Internet to complain about the prank. We’ve seen it happen before when Microsoft takes jabs at the Cupertino giant, and things did not end well, with the only exception being the relatively successful Cortana vs. Siri advertisements.
However, companies like Samsung and Google have had better success in attacking Apple, so there is a real change Lenovo could walk away from this prank with new fans, or a big scar delivered from the millions of Apple fans on the Internet.
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