Coining brand names is a perilous undertaking

As more and more Chinese companies position themselves and their brands internationally, one issue concerning their competitiveness is the pronunciation and meaning of the names they use in English. Key questions that face Chinese companies and their brand names in international markets are:

Should company names and brand names be changed from a simple transliteration of the Chinese name? If a change is made, how great or small should it be? What have other Asian companies and their brands such as Japanese ones, done on this issue?

It was Shakespeare who penned the immortal "What's in a name? That which we call a rose/by any other name would smell as sweet", in Romeo and Juliet. No doubt Shakespeare was hundreds of years ahead of his time, and even modern day brand management can learn a thing or two from this most didactic writer.

Here Shakespeare makes the point that the name itself forms a key association in the minds of people and, over time, simply the sound or sight of the name is sufficient to arouse the feelings associated with the consumption experience.

But surely such a brand-name association, hopefully positive, can only be achieved if the name is easily pronounced by its target market. While this is nearly always the case with brand names established for a company's domestic market, it is often seriously overlooked when companies seek to expand brand sales internationally, especially when expansion involves countries or regions where linguistic and cultural differences are not inconsiderable.

As more Chinese companies venture further afield often far away from their oriental, culturally and linguistically similar neighbors, they are encountering such difficulties. For example, Huawei, one of China's leading high-tech and most internationally established firms, is apparently pronounced, "Hawaii" across the US. Clearly, the US consumer remains blissfully ignorant of the Chinese language and, therefore, simply perceives what is most well known and easy to pronounce. Hence, the insertion of Hawaii because it closely resembles Huawei (hwa-way) and is probably the closest transliteration too.

So could this have been avoided and have other Asian giants followed the same fate when launching themselves globally?

Toyota, the Japanese car maker, initially received its name from its founder, Sakichi Toyoda. However, the name Toyoda was considered to be too Japanese, especially for US and European markets, so it was later changed to Toyota. When the word Toyota is written using the Japanese syllabary employed to transliterate foreign words, it takes, with a slight modification, eight brush strokes. Eight is the lucky number in Japan. The company wanted to give its brand name both numerological luck and a ringing sound for universal appeal. Toyota also makes use of repetition with the letter "t" pronounced twice. Repetition not only aids pronunciation but also memory, which is why we see many famous brand names with repetitive consonants and/or vowels, such as Coca-Cola, KitKat, Lenovo (the Chinese PC maker) and Wahaha (the Chinese soft drinks producer)

Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment (ZTE) Corporation of China, whose headquarters are in Shenzhen, has been gaining steadily in global market share. The abbreviation ZTE has been deployed knowingly as the corporate brand name from the outset, so as to remove any difficulty or confusion that consumers outside China and especially outside Asia would have in pronouncing Zhongxing.

Other examples of successful name changes that alleviated linguistic difficulty, among China's rapidly growing number of international companies and brands include China Mobile, Air China, Bank of China and China Life. China Life, now the world's most valuable life insurance brand, is an excellent example of linguistic simplicity, entirely suitable for such a rational, no-nonsense consumer brand name. However, such an approach does not appear to have been adopted by one of China Life's big domestic rivals, Ping An (ping aan).

While Ping An dominates in China, it will surely have difficulties abroad because of pronunciation and meaning. The words Ping and An result from a simple transliteration of two Chinese characters, which together mean peace, but only to those who understand Chinese. To most foreigners Ping An is meaningless and difficult to articulate, causing confusion. When foreign consumers look at the word An they may think of the indefinite article.

Furthermore, when non-Chinese articulate the word Ping, many will instantly think of a sharp, loud ringing noise, a sound not at all associated with peace, which appears to be Ping An's intended brand image.

Other examples of large, and internationally expanding, Chinese companies whose name may cause confusion are the electronics retailers Gome (go-may) and Suning, as well as China's leading air conditioner brand, Gree. For example, Gome may be easily pronounceable for non-Chinese speakers, but will mean nothing to them, and among English speakers leads to an association with the word that most closely resembles it in look and sound, as appears to be the case of Huawei. In the case of Gome, the English word that might most often come to mind is gnome, which may conjure up an image of a small humanoid creature.

Clearly, brand name pronunciation, meaning and association will vary considerable outside the Chinese language, and Chinese companies need to ensure that their desired brand image as well as linguistic simplicity is preserved. The following provides some guidance toward effective brand name pronunciation:

Repetition of vowel sound: such as Coca-Cola, Lenovo, Wahaha.

Repetition of consonant sound: such as KitKat, CCTV (China Central Television), Samsung.

Repetition not only eases pronunciation but leads to a greater likelihood of brand- name retention in long-term memory.

Use of a plosive at the beginning: In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oralstop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all air ceases. In the articulation of the plosive, three phases can be distinguished:

Catch: The airway closes so that no air can escape through the mouth (hence the name stop).

Hold or occlusion: The airway stays closed, causing a pressure difference to build up (hence the name occlusive).

Release or burst: The closure is opened. The released airflow produces a sudden impulse causing an audible sound, or burst (hence the name plosive).

As a result, a plosive requires a far greater effort to articulate, which often leads to greater impact and retention in the long-term memory.

Examples of consonants that produce a plosive are k, t, p and the hard c. As a result, brand names that begin with these letters and the sounds they make should prove more successful at making an impression and should be retained in memory more easily and permanently, such as Prada, TCL (the Chinese consumer electronics company), Kingfisher (an Indian beer brand), and Tongrentang (a Chinese medicine provider).

Let's also remember that Chinese brands, and Huawei in particular, have come a long way in a short time. Apart from Tongrentang and a few others, most Chinese brands' international presence only dates back to about the mid-1990s. However, to build on this rapid emergence, extreme care must be taken in formulating Chinese company names and brand names in foreign languages.

In most of the cases discussed above only a subtle alteration is necessary to improve ease of pronunciation, while retaining a similar appearance of the name. Any great change in the sound and appearance of a brand name may also result in confusion.

The author is a researcher at Nottingham University's School of Contemporary Chinese Studies. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.