EXCLUSIVE: (we all know what that means)...A superficial skim of multinationals' foolish Chinese names

A careless English brand name can temporarily halt a Chinese company's export aspirations, but the Chinese language causes unique headaches for 'global' corporations used to simply swaggering in and globalising new territories with their meticulously polished 'global' brand images.

Chinese manufacturers have from time to time entertained the English-speaking world with hilariously misguided brand names: "Pansy" mens underwear gave 1990s blokes a rare chance to fully demonstrate their lack of insecurity, while seasick ferry passengers in the 1980s could distract themselves with "MAXIPUKE" playing cards.

"Fang Fang" lipstick was not well received in Paris and New York, though "Golden Cock" alarm clocks are now sold as a collectors' item on eBay. No list of misguided brands would be complete without the unforgettable "Skinababe" baby powder offered to US mothers by a Japanese company.

Of course, the more cynical among us might delight in such innocence in an age of relentlessly psychological marketing, and purchase the product on principle. Sadly, the consumer brethren disagree en masse and the market tends to weed them out swiftly.

Many of the super-brands that dominate the Anglophone market do so with meaningless, self-referential names—names of people or places, or arbitrary combinations of letters chosen for their manly or ladylike sound. The all-important meaning of a brand is naturally easier to sculpt if the name itself is a blank slate.

But the jewel in globalisation's empire, China's millions, must be reached through its ancient writing system, a system in which almost every character is to some extent meaningful. The closest thing to meaningless characters are those that refer to noises, like "oh" or "ah", and even these can convey meaning. In fact, the founder of Wahaha, one of China's biggest drinks producers, used such characters to name his company after the sound of a chortling infant.

This doesn't fit in too with those companies who want a consistent, 'global', name, and by extension, brand image. Foreign expats and tourists in China find it difficult to get their tongue around many of their favourite products' Chinese names, for example, Coca-cola is pronounced "Ke kou ke le" (it means "Tasty-Happy"). "With 50,000 characters to choose from, couldn’t they have found one that made the pronunciation more like 'Kou ke kou le'?" grumbles an expat online.

Yes, they could. In fact, when the syrupy black stuff arrived in Shanghai in the 1928, Coke's diligent Chinese sellers, in the absence of any company-sanctioned alternative, wrote large signs encouraging the consumption of "Kou ke kou la"—an almost perfect rendition of the original pronunciation that meant, depending on the characters used, "Female Horse Stuffed with Wax", or "Bite the Wax Tadpole".

The lesson being that if a company doesn't coin its own Chinese brand names, Chinese consumers will do it for them. Polo, the high-end clothing manufacturer, tried to avoid taking a Chinese name and became known as the "Three-legged Horse" brand.

Google somehow managed to become widely known on the Chinese internet long before it took a Chinese name, but its market share was (and still is) puny compared with its near-monopoly in the West. Problem was, 'Google' was difficult for Chinese to remember how to spell—a vital prerequisite, one would think, for total domination of the internet-search industry. In early 2006 the company finally caved, announcing with great fanfare the adoption of 'Gu ge', (pronounced "Goo-guh") meaning "Valley Song" or "Harvest Song", as its Chinese brand.

Said Google China CEO Kai-fu Lee: "We think searching is like harvesting—you're reaping rewards and celebrating having great results, so we like that poetic aspect."

Plenty didn't. Before all this, Google had been known in China by a variety of unofficial and in some cases beloved Chinese names, most popularly 'Gou gou' (Dog-dog) and 'Gu gou' ("Ancient Dog"). After the company launched its bucolic new image, thousands of Chinese internet users (presumably Google's hardcore fans) howled protests and signed a petition against the name on a dedicated website, noGuGe.com. "Uncool!" they cried, "rural!" "backward!"

Of course, those who actually cared enough about Google's name to launch protests were something approaching a lunatic fringe. But more importantly, while 'Google' is now officially a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary, the choice of 'Gu ge' has scuppered its chances of repeating such an extraordinary insertion into the Chinese language.

As Andy Chuang, CEO of Chinese naming consultants Good Characters, puts it, "it does not have verb potential". Though many Chinese words are both nouns and verbs, you definitely can't "song" anything. Ironic too because its Chinese nemesis, Baidu, which continues to pummel it in market share (58 per cent to 26 per cent in 2007), has pounced on the idea—its search button now reads in Chinese, "Baidu it", and it's catching on.

But for some companies simply being foreign can be enough to ensure a brand's popularity with Chinese consumers, and there are now exist a group of characters used almost exclusively in foreign words—a bit like Katakana in Japanese.

Lexus changed its Chinese name in 2005, from 'Ling zhi', meaning 'High Ideal', to the completely nonsensical 'Lei ke sa si'. Well, almost completely nonsensical. All four characters are commonly used to render foreign words, but 'sa si' is a common rendering of SARS, the killer virus that had terrorised China in 2003. Yet sales have soared since the name change. Company spokesperson Vanessa Hou says the rebranding "made the connection to the name Lexus clearer, thereby better establishing the brand image."

The problem for foreign companies using these "foreign-looking" characters, however forgiving the Chinese public may be towards a brand's negative connotations, is that Chinese companies have taken a distinct liking to their connotations of foreignness.

It's a common tactic outside China. Australia's Dolmio pasta sauces are made by Masterfoods and have never graced the shelves of Italy, while ice-cream giant Haagen-Dazs is New York born-and-bred. But University of Montana business professor Dr Fengru Li says foreign-looking transliterations have become almost useless for foreign companies in China.

"That is probably not going to be a trend any more," Dr Li says. "They are no longer uniquely representative of foreign ownership, nor of the assumed premier quality. The consumers' perceptions have changed."

While some Chinese companies may want to appear foreign, foreign companies are often quite content to appear Chinese. Lucky characters referring to happiness, good fortune or wealth are quite bankable as Chinese names, leading to an amusingly Maoist lack of distinctiveness among many major global brands.

For example, wealthier shoppers may be seen in 'Jia le fu' (Carrefour) hypermarkets stocking up on 'Jia le shi' (Kelloggs) cereal and 'Jia jie shi' (Crest) toothpaste before heading home to down 'Duo mei le' (Dominos) pizza with 'Mei le' (Miller) beer under a 'Mei de' (Midea) air conditioner.

But who can blame companies for staying with the tried-and-tested formula? Standard Chartered Bank's Chinese name, the "Scum-dozen Bank" probably doesn't draw too many new local customers through the door, judging by responses around Shanghai.

"The feeling is bad," said a woman in a Shanghai restaurant. A man on a subway train was even more decided: "If I had money in the 'Scum-dozen Bank', I'd definitely move it to the 'Bountiful Collection Bank' (HSBC)," he said.

Standard Chartered's name hails from another place, from Old China, when only a small minority of the Chinese population could read Chinese script—though those who could were presumably wealthy.

Legendary Old Shanghai adman Carl Crow's strategy addressing this was "to make every advertisement as complete as possible without the use of a word of text." His agency was probably not responsible for the early 20th century posters showing elegant Chinese ladies glamorising 'Forced to Vomit the Spirit' baby formula (Lactogen) and 'Stupid Turnip' medicines.

Crow understood Chinese characters couldn't just be thrown together like letters, and before he sent an advert to press carrying a new Chinese name, he would run a "test for ribaldry".

"China is the paradise of punsters, and the most sedate phrase may, by a simple change in tone, be turned into a ribald quip which will make the vulgar roar," he wrote in 1937.

Andy Chuang echoes this today, pointing out that many companies fail to factor in regional China's many dialects and regional pronunciations.

Chuang cites the worldwide Nissan model whose Chinese name the company translated directly as "Blue bird". Innocuous enough in Standard Mandarin, but in the Hakka dialect spoken by more than 30 million it's a homonym for 'male genitalia'.

And if there's no other way to get shame and scorn heaped on your brand name there are always good old national sore spots to poke.

Toyota thought it was just rolling with the latest fashion when it named its Prado SUV the 'Rule-by-Force' ('Ba dao'). The character 'Ba', meaning tyrant, has seen a recent surge in popularity among Chinese brand names, and one of the country's leading local shampoo brands is named 'Ba wang', or 'Overlord'. Toyota ran an advert in an auto magazine showing a pair of Chinese-style stone lions deferring to the Prado, accompanied by the text, "Rule-by-Force: You must respect it".

But coming from a Japanese company, tyranny is not at all trendy—understandably so given 20th century history. Hundreds of thousands of complaints poured into the censors' office, which promptly banned the advert after originally allowing it to print. Toyota not only withdrew the ad, they rebranded the car.

The Toyota 'Rule-by-Force' didn't offend everyone in China, though. According to the Chinese internet, it was particularly popular with one group: local government officials in Sichuan Province.