The encyclopedia · Marketing & Brand · Marketing decision · 2026-07
Honor unveiled '荣耀之环' and dared to be different — netizens saw Grok and 王者荣耀 instead
Honor's new '荣耀之环' logo and '敢想，敢不同' slogan drew instant comparisons to Grok, 王者荣耀 and a 2013 Baidu icon — the rebrand became the joke
荣耀 (Honor) · 2026-07-23
What happened
On 23 July 2026 Honor CEO 李健 unveiled the new brand mark '荣耀之环' along with the slogan '敢想，敢不同', in English 'DARE TO BE'. The mark is a white ring broken by a diagonal opening cut into two differently-facing gaps, which the company explained as '打破完美之圆，向内探索、向外突破' — an inward reach into communications, imaging and foldables, an outward push into global markets.
The launch was framed as strategy: 李健 noted it had been 508 days since Honor started its '阿尔法战略', the 2025-03 pivot from a smartphone maker to a global AI terminal ecosystem company that has since spawned AI phones, the Robot Phone, embodied intelligence robots and a cross-brand terminal ecosystem. The new mark was meant to align the outward identity with that inward direction.
What the public actually noticed was the resemblance. Netizens compared 荣耀之环 to the Grok icon (designed by Jon Vio around a black-hole singularity, its ring and notch reading as a 'G'), to 王者荣耀's 2018 abstract badge, and even to Baidu browser's 2013 6.0 Beta icon. Despite very different design intents, the shared ring-gap-oblique-line vocabulary made the four marks practically interchangeable to the eye.
The rebrand arrived while Honor's phone business was under pressure: it dropped out of China's TOP 5 in 2025, and its 2026 shipments slipped. The joke landed on a brand that had just repeated a slogan about being different — and the crowd's answer was that different looks a lot like everyone else.
Why it happened
- The mark meant to break a perfect circle used the ring-with-a-gap form common to tech icons, so the 'different' claim was tested against the most-seen symbols in consumer tech.
- Launched under a slogan demanding difference, any resemblance became a punchline: '敢想，敢不同' invited the crowd to judge the mark against Grok and 王者荣耀, and it lost.
- Repeated against a phone business slipping out of the top five, the AI-strategic gloss read as story over substance — a rebrand pitching boldness while the core business lost ground.
The lesson
A logo built from the same ring-and-gap vocabulary as famous icons invites the comparison before it can earn the meaning. Announcing 'different' hands the audience the standard to fail against.
Aftermath
The '荣耀之环' and '敢想，敢不同' became a meme within hours, with the comparison to Grok and 王者荣耀 doing the talking that Honor's strategic framing could not. The commercial cost was contained — no product was recalled and no share was lost over a mark — but the reputational cost was a rebrand that started as a joke rather than a statement, on a brand already fighting to hold its place in the Chinese handset market.
Sources
spotted an error? The club wants to know.
More like this
Logitech China called customers 'dogs' in an ad — and got fined for it
Huawei's affiliate Dingqiao sold phones that looked like Huawei — and confused everyone
BBK was China's top-3 phone brand — then its own success killed it for OPPO and Vivo
Somewhere, someone solved the problem this company failed at. 2nd Opinion →
Comments · 0
Sign in to join the comments.