[Answer] If Most of the Industry Does the Same, Why Is Lenovo Such a Frequent Target?

[Answer] If Most of the Industry Does the Same, Why Is Lenovo Such a Frequent Target?

My personal impression is that Lenovo’s core leadership and its entire PR department are still operating with a mindset stuck in the 1990s. They face all kinds of imagined enemies in a state of constant unease. But even Lenovo itself cannot clearly explain who these supposed enemies are; it cannot even sketch a rough outline of them. From that perspective, there may not actually be any real “enemies of Lenovo” at all.

Behind Lenovo’s so-called “public image collapse,” it may be more helpful to compare the situation to the downfall of one celebrity after another in the entertainment world. A celebrity may indeed have flaws, but not necessarily flaws of that magnitude; it is just that the power of the internet magnifies and emphasizes them, and those flaws turn out to be inconsistent with the image the celebrity has always tried to maintain. Once that happens, the persona collapses.

Lenovo may be facing something similar. Lenovo itself may feel wronged and believe it is not nearly as bad as it is made out to be online. But if even a tenth or a fifth of these incidents are not just baseless rumors, then for Lenovo—which has long positioned itself as a “national brand”—that is enough to count as a complete collapse of its public persona.

And this collapse is unlikely to be the work of any particular competitor. In the smartphone market, Lenovo has already become too weak to matter. In the PC market, because the entire market is in decline, everyone is struggling to survive; who would still have the spare energy to focus on Lenovo? Lenovo’s so-called imagined enemies are, in fact, the same force that every celebrity faces when their persona falls apart: the power of the internet as a whole.

Under those circumstances, being unable to reverse the situation is the most likely outcome. A sincere apology and a clear explanation of the facts may be the only slim chance of recovery. As for Lenovo’s approach of stubbornly refusing to admit fault and fighting against the entire internet, the most likely result is that after being repeatedly proven wrong, its decline will only accelerate.