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The Sunday Paper – Brand Name Types and Consumer Demand: Evidence from China’s Automobile Market

Get your brand name type right, at least in autos in China, and you can expect a 7.6% sales advantage. Get it wrong and your sales could under-perform by as much as nearly 5%; so what is ‘right’ and/or ‘wrong’?

The authors of the paper highlighted this week, Fang Wu, Qi Sun, Rajdeep Grewal and Shanjun Li of the universities of Shanghai (Wu and Sun), North Carolina and Cornell respectively, devised a four category system for categorizing brand types: Alphanumeric, phonetic, phonosemantic and semantic (stay with me). It might help to give some examples:

Alphanumeric; this is what you might expect i.e. BMW 328i or, in their example, Mazda CX7.

Phonetic; this is just a meaningless sound i.e. Toyota Alphard or in their example the Chery You-Lee-O which sounds Chinese-ey, but isn’t.

Phonosemantic; this is where, often foreign brands, try to localize their name i.e. Ke-Kou-Ke-Le is how most Chinese recognize Coke or, in their example, the Volkswagen Turan which in China becomes the Tu-An which (kind of) means safe travels.

Semantic; this is a name that has meaning locally but may or may not convey attributes of the vehicle. The best example I can think of in the West is perhaps Volkswagen Golf. In the paper they highlight Geely’s Xiong Mao which is panda in Chinese.

So what works best? The answer is complicated but as this is a summary I’ll summarize; semantic is the clear winner, especially if you’re trying to sell in the low or mid-end and to first time buyers. Geely therefore hit just the right note with ‘Panda’. What works least well? Phonosemantic names, probably because they just confuse an already vague message in the vernacular.

The authors believe the work is applicable to other markets that use a logographic writing system (characters representing words or phrases) such as Korea, Japan and Vietnam. They also believe their findings may have relevance for other consumer product categories, especially those being introduced by foreign operators.

An interesting aside; know what Apple use now for their name in China? It’s Ping-guo, which is apple in Chinese.  A long time ago they introduced the Ma-jin-ta (Mackintosh) computer (麦金塔电脑), which probably didn’t go quite so well?

Follow this link to the paper in full Chinese Autos; What’s In A Name?

Happy Sunday.

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