Why your brands and products need a Chinese name to penetrate the Chinese e-commerce market? Sandrine Zerbib (Full Jet) and Bruno Grangier (Leaf) are discussing this topic with Vladimir Djurovic (Founder & CEO of Labbrand Group), a specialist of naming brands in Chinese. Full Jet is an e-commerce agency based in China and in France. Leaf is a corporate law firm based in China and in Europe. **Contacts:** - Sandrine Zerbib de Full Jet (zerbib@fulljet.com.cn) - Bruno Grangier de Leaf (b.grangier@leaf-legal.com)
Brand Name Essential in China: Strong Chinese names ensure visibility and protect equity by preventing counterfeits and competitors.
Trademark Registration Critical: Early registration prevents costly legal issues; about 80% face trademark conflicts, highlighting risks.
Engaging Consumers with Local Names: Well-crafted names enhance brand relevance, boosting search volume and sales significantly in the market.
Consumer Testing for Names: The naming process includes extensive testing to ensure resonance and memorability across various dialects.
Legal Risks of Poor Naming Choices: Inadequate naming strategies lead to lawsuits and market access loss; established brands have faced long battles
00:09
Speaker 2
Welcome back in this new episode of the podcast where we crack the code of the China E commerce Today with Sandrine Zerbib from Full Jet, we have a guest, Vladimir Djurovic from Lab Brand. He will talk about his passion naming brands in Chinese. Super interesting. I hope you will enjoy this podcast. I'm Bruno Grandier, a partner from Leaf, a law firm based in China. Many companies ask themselves how to make their brand successful in China. Every client asks themselves how to localise their brands. Some clients prefer to keep their foreign name as they believe this foreign element defines better their identity. Some will choose a Chinese name. How to do it? Why is it essential to have a Chinese name for your brand to succeed on the Chinese market? Sandrine Zerbib, you are the CEO and founder of Fulljet, an e commerce consulting agency.
01:04
Speaker 2
You work with famous brands on the Chinese market and your company has received a great award, the top ten APAC E commerce company.
01:13
Speaker 3
Thank you Bruno. So Bruno Granger, you are the founding partner of Leaf, one of the biggest Sino European team in China. Your firm is specialised on cross border transactions and has received equally several awards on M&A deals. Among others, your firm is assisting many foreign companies to set up their distribution network in China.
01:33
Speaker 2
Thank you Sandrine. And today we have a special guest. Vladimir Djurovic, you're the founder and CEO of Lab Brand Group. This is a leading brand agency with headquarters in Shanghai. You have offices in China, in us, in Singapore, in France, Canada and you have helped hundreds of companies including Fortune 500 on the brand localization in China, including naming and Chinese naming. Thank you Vladimir for being with us and thank you all for being with us. Let's crack the code of ecommerce and distribution in China. So naming brands in China, what are the challenges and opportunities? Let's remind that as an introduction, naming is key to develop your brand online and in the digital space in China. By digital space we mean social media, including WeChat, Weibo and Baidu.
02:27
Speaker 2
Naming is key to adapting to the Chinese market and we are going to talk about that and give examples. And registering your Chinese brand is key to the security of your business in China. We will see that there are numerous legal issues behind that. Why do you need a good Chinese name? Vladimir Djurovic, why do your clients wants.
02:48
Speaker 1
A great Chinese name? Thanks Bruno Grangier for this intro for the participants to the webinar. Just a quick precision. We heard naming several times. What we're going to talk about is these few Chinese characters that goes along for a Name you heard probably of Carrefour, Jiālèfú (家乐福) or Coca Cola. Kěkǒukělè (可口可乐) . So those are the names that go with your corporate name, product name and so on. So actually, why do you need this type of Chinese name to go with Your brand? First 3 Big Ideas is naming is a business requirement and another idea is that it will be a very good tool to boost your roi. And and it's also a way to really become part of this fantastic culture that is the Chinese culture. So let's look a little bit one by one on those points that are on the screen here.
03:54
Speaker 1
You can see for the business requirement, the searchability is that you know that. We will see more detail in the next section. Most of the search in China be on search engines on ecommerce will be done by the Chinese customer in Chinese characters. Another point is the brand equity that if you do not give your brand a Chinese name, someone else will be the client, the competitor, the distributor or counterfeiters. You will have a lot of new friends to play with and to fight against if you don't do it early on in the process in entering China. The other aspect on boosting the ROI is that your Chinese name will be linguistically appealing and attractive to a target market and it will therefore accelerate the growth and awareness shareability. Very important. We all know how important social is in E commerce in China.
05:02
Speaker 1
It's really a deep trend. Speak the customer's language. Seems pretty simple. If you have a Chinese name, it will allow consumers to remember and talk about you, share more about you. Further on, if we go on the cultural part, if your Chinese brand name is well chosen, it's an occasion to rethink your brand, to localise it, to really think about how your brand will be the local embodiment of your brand culture, values, personality and vision. And finally I want to say is that for accelerating growth and awareness, a very basic thing is that a brand without a Chinese name runs the risk of being perceived as a brand that is distant from Chinese consumer. And this is something that could be very costly for a brand.
06:02
Speaker 2
Sure. Any comments on this?
06:06
Speaker 3
Well, this is all so true and we're going to get one by one in the details of all this and we're going to have lots of examples. But before we look at the slides with example, I want to mention a very famous example which is the one of Timberland. Actually Timberland had been in China already for a number of years with a name that did not really resonate with Chinese consumers and they decided, which is quite courageous because it's not easy to change name in the course of your business. They decided to change the Chinese name and they went for Tī bù làn (踢不烂), which actually means kicks but doesn't break, and gave this idea that it's unbreakable.
06:48
Speaker 3
And literally in a. I wouldn't say in days, but in a few months we saw an explosion of their sales, particularly the sales of their yellow boots, an explosion of their search on Baidu as well as multiple views of their video. And it had an incredible effect. It's a very famous example, but we will see many others thanks to Vladimir.
07:09
Speaker 2
Yes, and I guess also you can see that on the back end of the Tmall stores, basically for your clients in ecommerce.
07:14
Speaker 3
It is true that I'm not going to give specific examples about my clients, but it is absolutely true. And I would like to mention a specific example that happens quite recently with the luxury brand that decided after we insisted to use their Chinese names for their store names and for the search and keywords. And again, we had an explosion of both search and views and sales in less than a month.
07:42
Speaker 2
So, Vladimir, you proposed first of all, your company has named in Chinese LinkedIn famous social network. What can you tell us?
07:54
Speaker 1
Yeah, I think this is an interesting case. Global Internet company that has relatively well succeeded in China. Not a small feat. And I like to think that the choice of the Chinese name was a contributor to that. So you can see the Chinese name in green and it's also the green line on the graph. See, the green line is growing, is actually the number of search linked on Baidu of Lǐngyīng (领英), the Chinese name of LinkedIn. And in blue you can see the line in English on Baidu. So we can see that from the launch of the Chinese name 14, the Green Line has been growing very steadily. And in 2017 it has surpassed LinkedIn on Baidu. And in 2019 the users of LinkedIn China has been multiplied by 10 in one single year.
09:01
Speaker 1
There is a very strong resonance with the brand that we believe is linked with the choice also the characters of Lingyin, because it means in Chinese, not like in alphabetic in English, as you know, LinkedIn maybe for most of you in Chinese, it doesn't mean to be just linked together in Chinese, Ling Ying means leading heroes. And when we did the creation, we did have some options with names that were closer to LinkedIn original meaning, like Liányīng, for example, which means Lián linked (联英) together and yīng must be linked together. It's. We did some research and we found out that the name LinkedIn was much more resonating with. Was resonating much stronger with the audience. And we like to think that this has helped LinkedIn actually, as we will talk later, to reinterpret its value for the Chinese market.
10:04
Speaker 2
Okay, great. Let's see in details now the six reason to choose a Chinese name. The first one, reason, number one, is a business prerequisite. Chinese consumers are increasingly using Chinese brand names to look for brand information. That's the first. Vladimir Djurovic, what can you tell us about this?
10:32
Speaker 1
Yeah, you can see more lines here like in the previous slide, actually, just more examples of usage of Chinese name versus alphabetic names. So we can see that the Chinese name of Amazon is pretty low, but the English name is decreasing a lot. And then we have on Microsoft, we can see that the reactions on anytime we have a buzz is much stronger on the Chinese name than on the. Than on the alphabetic name. This means basically that the, you know, if you are doing some successful work in China, your customer will search and find you mostly in Chinese and it could be also the way for you to maximise the roi.
11:35
Speaker 3
And actually, if I want, if I may add to this, it's not only true on search engines like Baidu, but also on platforms themselves. A lot of consumers would actually directly go to platforms to do their search. And it's even more striking how much more searches you have on the Chinese name than on the English name.
11:59
Speaker 2
Yeah, so when you're talking about platforms, you're talking about tmall.
12:04
Speaker 3
Exactly.
12:05
Speaker 2
All the digital marketplaces in China. And Sandrine Zerbib, do you have any example maybe that you can share then that really illustrate the direct impact of the naming? I think you were sharing information on Christophe maybe, or some luxury brands.
12:24
Speaker 3
Yes, that was one of the examples I shared just now that indeed when we decided to find that the client accepted to go for their Chinese name for the search, it had an immediate. What is interesting is that not only it had a strong impact, but the immediacy of the impact is striking.
12:47
Speaker 2
Thank you Sandrine Zerbib. Reason number two, another business prerequisite. If you don't give your brand the Chinese name, someone else will either. Clients, competitors, distributors, third parties and of course counterfeiters. That's a very interesting thing here. We need to remind something. The registration of your trademark in any country, including China, is not only to protect yourself from illegal copy. For counterfeiting. Being the owner of your registered trademark is first of all a necessity to distribute online platform. Online platform will ask you to provide the trademark certificates. That's the point. Number One but also registering your trademark will avoid. Not only will not only give you the right to fight against counterfeiting, it will avoid a third party that would register the trademark to force you to exit the market.
13:52
Speaker 2
I can take a very simple example, look at the history, look at the example of Caster, this trademark and maybe. Vladimir, you want to tell us more about that?
14:08
Speaker 1
Sure. I mean, I think most of us have heard about those scary stories about being hijacked with your trademark. And Castel is a good example because maybe most of the French listener here familiar with this brand. For those that are not, it's a very famous wine trading and wine producer in France, one of the very important exporter to China. So one of their partner, I mean they did register the alphabetic name Kǎsītèe, but they didn't register the Chinese name that start to be famous. Since the launch in 2000, gradually the name was known and used but never registered. Eight years later the partner registered the name and a year later he launched a lawsuit against Castel and claimed a compensation of 40 million yuan for unlawful use of the trademark in Chinese.
15:18
Speaker 1
So the Wenzhou Intermediate People Court had a very interesting position on this case since they basically let the local former partner Li Daozhi get a compensation of 33.73 million yuan. So more or less 4 million euro in that amount in 2012, which. Which is quite massive knowing that basically not only Castel didn't really get its name back, but they had to pay back to pay the infringer. Yeah, it's interesting that this story, I mean, happens with the Chinese name. It could even happen with the alphabetic name, but with the Chinese name the chances are even higher that this happened because there is less, let's say strength because the Chinese court will recognise the power of a famous brand from a foreign country to a certain extent, but with the Chinese name it's much more difficult to claim that.
16:29
Speaker 2
So it's clear, I mean registering your alphabetic name and your Chinese name is very important and it's actually a security in order to make sure that you can either distribute but also produce and export from China. I've been involved in cases where some clients were complaining about containers blocked at the customs while they are trying to export product with registry registered name and that were blocked by a counterfeiter, by people, by third parties having registered that way.
17:04
Speaker 1
on top of this story on Castel. I wanted to add one thing is that to make the case even more painful for the focuser it was to they had to make a public apology. And 13 years after the name was in the market, they had to rename and to rebuild a new name. So it took them a long time. So I really think, I hope that for the listeners today that you can avoid spending so long time until getting to the point of protecting, you know, your space of equity for your brand in the Chinese language.
17:43
Speaker 2
Sandrine Zerbib, any comments, any story to share?
17:46
Speaker 3
Well, I think two stories, one which is quite famous, which is Jordan the basketball player, which has his own brand and his brand has been hijacked, we can say, by a company. So in Chinese you have to understand that you have a good chance to win if it's hijacked by a company that just sits on it and basically blackmail you to get money from your name. But as long as they use the Chinese name for operations, your chance to win is very difficult. And it took eight years for Jordan to win Qiáodān (乔丹) and he won on this matter. What is interesting, he won on the Chinese characters after eight years of lawsuits. He did not win on the transliteration of the Chinese characters and it did not win on the logo, which is a little character jumping. Exactly.
18:47
Speaker 3
But I would like also to say to, and particularly to the audience, I want to insist on this, that a lot of people, especially when they enter the market in the early stages with the distributor, they think of registering. Now they kind of think of registering their alphabetical trademark. They don't often they don't do this for their Chinese name and they sort of underestimate the importance. And I think that I can really share this information that it's about 80% of my clients who are in this situation like re entering the market or in an early stage of market entry that got into this kind of trouble on their Chinese name.
19:26
Speaker 2
Vladimir Djurovic any other stories you have seen? Because it's not only bad stories.
19:32
Speaker 1
Well, I think first of all I'm impressed by the number of 80%. I mean it's really massive. So we definitely see this very often by 80%, I think practical work that really tells how frequent this issue for me, it reminds me the story of Starbucks, actually, which, you know, they had this name currently they still have the name Simba Co. And you know, they never thought that someone will entry the name Xīngbākè (星巴克) before them and register it. So they had a competitor for years where Simba chain was coexisting with Starbucks. The story. We talk a lot about trademarks, but the trademark case was won pretty fairly quickly in that case.
20:25
Speaker 1
But it took them about 10 years to really get the cleanup, to clean up the situation with all the Chamber of Commerce and the registration of the company names, because there were still confusions when they were fighting to get the space, because the counterfeiter in that case was coming with a company that has the Symbac name, which give them access to very good retail space and create confusion in the market.
20:57
Speaker 2
And think that we can also talk about a very interesting example, Porsche.
21:04
Speaker 1
Yeah, Porsche is a bit of a different story. In a way, they're less unlucky than the one we talked about before. Porsche hasn't been fined, to my knowledge, but they had an interesting story because they're famous car model names. So the famous, for example, the Cayenne in Chinese, Kǎyàn (卡宴), is a name that they didn't think about registering. And since they have very passionate fans in China, they created a website that actually present all the names of the models in Chinese. So it's pretty unified in a way. There is not a multiple names coexisting and confusion. But one little thing that happened is that. But Porsche didn't own the property, the intellectual property, the trademarks of those names. And in some of the cases, they are owned by some little companies producing electrical motorbikes.
22:14
Speaker 1
And when Porsche wanted to get them, they systematically lost the possibility to own their trademark. So probably not hijacked and being fine, but they have been losing the opportunity to own all these brands.
22:31
Speaker 2
Thank you, Vladimir. So now let's move to the next reason. Reason number three, having a Chinese name is ROI booster will help you to.
22:43
Speaker 1
Build your brand equity.
22:47
Speaker 2
First of all, if you don't have a Chinese name, your brand can be diluted. Could you tell us what dilution of a brand means?
22:57
Speaker 3
Well, I think there are many ways of having your brand diluted. One way is indeed to have your Chinese name not clearly defined and controlled by the brand, and therefore left in the hands of counterfeiters, but also just simply consumers who give you a name or a sort of nickname. And as a result, your brand is represented by multiple names in the market, which is a dilution, because when you want to communicate, then you communicate. It's much more difficult to communicate on multiple names. I think also, Vladimir, you want to talk about some examples which are positive examples, where, on the contrary, we see the strength of a name and we understand what is precisely the reverse of dilution.
23:52
Speaker 1
Yes Bruno Grangier. So I think you know that Chinese, if you've been in the Chinese market or if you're coming Most of you must expect, and I hope you expect, to be in a competitive place. And that's what happened with Vitamin Water. When they entered China, very soon they saw a competitor that looked very similar. Actually, what you see on the screen is not twice Vitamin Water, but actually Vitamin Water on the top and a competitor on the bottom. Actually, these two brands, the competitor is a very famous Nongfu Shenxuan, Nongfu Spring, also a big company, so not very easy to, let's say, to play against, because they have very huge volume and Vitamin Water at the time. I mean, they easily compete on volume and it's hard to just get a win on the design. But.
24:46
Speaker 1
But the good thing, they were able to differentiate through the Chinese name, because the Chinese name of Nongfu Spring was Liangdi and for the Chinese name of the Coca Cola brand, Vitamin Water was Kule Shi. So this is a way actually to see how you can build your equity in a very busy space by having something for which the consumer will be very sensitive to about, on which he can make even subtle differences. And here is the difference is not so little. The two names sound quite different. And in that way you can actually carve out your brand equity and avoid this phenomena that you mentioned of dilution in a market with a lot of competitor and sometimes copycats and confusion. Yeah, clear.
25:36
Speaker 2
So this example is very clearly illustrating the fact that Chinese consumers will use the name to differentiate the products. And let's talk about. So a famous brand in China, Crocodiles, the Free Crocodile story.
25:51
Speaker 1
Yes. I probably only scratched the surface of his story. Maybe it's a saga with many episodes. So my angle is actually just that Lacoste didn't necessarily use the Chinese name to actually call out its brand equity. They are very recognisable visually with the crocodile. So very naturally, as a crocodile coming from France, the consumer said, Fǎguó èyú (法国鳄鱼), it means like French crocodile. And then what happened? I think because of this very vibrant name that strikes the imagination, you can picture it. There is a lot of births of small crocodiles in China. We can see two examples on the screen, Cartello and Crocodile. Maybe some of them are coming from different business partners, but I do. Being in China at the time when those little crocodiles were being born, there was really dozens of them and those are just two big examples.
26:59
Speaker 1
So my interpretation is that of these possibilities that Lacoste never tried to own the crocodile name or. Or maybe they tried too late to do that, but. And they have actually an official name that is Lākēsītè, that is not very well known by consumer. It's very phonetic, very neutral, and it feels almost like Lacoste didn't really invest or trust in that name. So much more like a transliteration, not a lot of meaning. We talked about meaning a bit with other examples later on, but just also for the listeners today, it's interesting that for those that are Western eye, I mean, just look at Cartelo. For most of us, that's very different from Lacoste. But if you look more closely, it's almost a nanogram of Lacoste. It's almost the same letters, one letter difference.
27:59
Speaker 1
So it also show a little bit how the Chinese quote consumers, see the brands. You know, sometimes you don't see really the fine difference on the alphabetic name. You're much more easy. I mean, even something that is such a different anagram could be considered as a choice to confuse a Chinese reader. It won't confuse you as a Western reader, but it's a bit. The phenomena we have maybe as Westerners, when we look at Chinese character, when we. Our head can be very easily spinning and we get to confuse two different groups.
28:32
Speaker 2
So a question on brands and actually something that is related to brands, it's the creation by the consumers or fans of nicknames, such as, for example, you know, many customers rename the brand or product, as for example, in McDonald's becoming MacDo. So do we have the same thing in China?
28:55
Speaker 3
Massively, massively. Nicknames are massive in China, probably even more so than in the West. Interesting for brands, that's for sure, but even more so for products. So usually product names are not very friendly names. And when the product is liked by the consumer, they would actually rename or nickname the product to talk about it, just simply to talk about it. And then it's actually going to become a key for search. If the brand knows how to manage this, it becomes a key for search on the sales platform. Now, these nicknames in many cases are actually created by consumers who actually like these products. And they are fun, easy to remember. They refer to the shape, they refer to the quality of the product and things like that. They're not always easy to register.
29:47
Speaker 3
Bruno Grangier, one thing that at least brands can consider, and I think it's very important, is to try as much as possible to drive the creation of the nicknames and not leave it entirely to the consumers. Not that the consumers don't do a good job. But again, there is this dilution effect that you may end up. You leave it totally to the consumers, you may end up with Multiple nicknames, which is not very easy then to manage.
30:12
Speaker 2
Yes. And it's IP. It's a form of intellectual property. And it must be different in China than in other countries where the registration of this IP takes so much time. Correct me if I'm wrong, Vladimir Djurovic, but to register a trademark, it takes around 12 to 18 months to take this kind of time. So it will affect the capacity of the.
30:37
Speaker 1
Of the brands to react.
30:38
Speaker 2
This kind of maybe seasonal phenomenon.
30:41
Speaker 3
Yeah. And I think a lot of brands actually decide not even to try, because it's not only the. The time it takes, but it's also that they have characteristics which are not registrable, not 100% of cases, but they often have characteristics which are descriptive, basically, and are not easy to register.
31:05
Speaker 2
We can talk about the fourth reason. Another ROI booster. Your Chinese name should be appealing to your target market. Sandrine Zerbib. , any specific examples?
31:19
Speaker 1
I'm going to share with you one example I really like, Bruno Grangier. It's the Chinese name of Chanel, Xiāngnài’ér (香奈儿) because it tells a lot of stories about what's a name and also it breaks sometimes some ideas that our customers that come to develop a name have about what's a good name. Obviously, when you hear Xiāngnài’ér (香奈儿) .
31:50
Speaker 3
For.
31:51
Speaker 1
A western year, maybe you don't get it's very close. But for Chinese ear, it's quite close because so when you've been in China for a period of time, you say, oh, okay, Chanel = Xiāngnài’ér (香奈儿) . It's quite close. Phonetically, there is no real total. There is many way to be close phonetically. That's why actually choosing your name is a bit of an artist because you have many options and none of them is Very few are pure transliteration and they could be unique. We've seen before Lacoste. It's one of many transliteration because there's many characters that pronounce the same. But here, why Chanel is a good name is I think because it has one part the Xiang, which talk about Xiangshui, the perfume. And we also have the fragrance like here in. We have Fangxiang and we have.
32:43
Speaker 1
Also for Chinese consumers that travel to Paris, they will see the map and they will see. They'll go on Champs Elysees. Champs Elysees in Chinese is using this character in it and we know it's linked with also the story of Chanel. So it's resonating with several mental association that are linked with the brand. And it's, you know, and a good name should have this power to evocate multiple level and to be almost like a way to enter into the universe of the brand. Not to mention that Xiang is a relatively feminine character in this vocation. And Chanel is famous for being one of the only big fashion brand without male fashion collections. All this in one character. But the last two characters, I didn't talk too much about them, Nai and R actually are quite phonetic pointers.
33:44
Speaker 1
And one interesting thing in this name is that Nai and R are carrying less meaning. Actually. The translation of them is not very. R has no meaning and Nair means endurance or its main meaning. It's not what's written on the slide, but it's one of the main meaning. And Nair is actually almost. Very quickly, in a fraction of second, a Chinese reader will know that this is maybe a translation. It's characters that I use. It's not as clear as in Japanese when you have specific characters or even an Alphabet for that, but for a Chinese reader, that's a pointer. This is an adapted name from a foreign country, maybe. So this name is a mix of meaning and pointers, indicating to the reader that this is a foreign name.
34:32
Speaker 1
It's beautiful because you can actually, by using Chinese character, indicate to your consumer that you come from abroad, you're a foreign brand. By using Chinese, you show that you are actually coming from abroad. It breaks a big myth that actually, to be foreign, you don't need to use Chinese character here. This name shows actually you can achieve good evocations and also say who you are, stay true to yourself in a way by the use of these characters.
35:05
Speaker 2
So, yeah, we can feel your passion, Vladimir. And an interesting story and funny one is the other example that we follow, which is being the research and, yeah, being in Chinese.
35:19
Speaker 1
What does it mean again? Yeah, if you ask a Chinese colleague that is not very familiar, that is spending his time on Baidu, if hears Bing in English, he will think, well, you must be crazy. I mean, it's something bad. Or Bing, it doesn't work well. You know, something that doesn't work well, your bing, you know, means that it's defectuous. It's not a very good tool. So if this brand Bing was launched in China without a Chinese name to kind of correct the sound of the alphabetic name, I think it would have been a lot of laughter and a lot of problem. Actually, probably it has already because it's fighting against Baidu to a certain extent. It's very hard. But the Chinese name , I think, is actually quite interesting and definitely helpful for this name.
36:06
Speaker 1
To even have an existence here and not being actually laughed about all the day, all day long. I would say it's being is actually quite elegant name in terms of meaning, because it's closed phonetically, but it's not bing, it's being. So it's actually, for a Chinese consumer, it's already very different. And being means to, must, comply. So that's very nice because you enter a name and the result will comply with what you put. So it's actually a very nice name on the functional benefit you get from a search engine.
36:43
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's a great example of a Chinese name helping the brand name and saving the brand name on the Chinese. And reason number five, becoming part of the Chinese culture. Your Chinese brand name is the local embodiment of your brand's culture, values, personality and vision. Sandrine Zerbib, what do you think about this concept?
37:09
Speaker 3
Well Bruno Grangier, I think it's very important because when you choose your Chinese name, and I think Vladimir had great examples and was quite passionate and it was actually fascinating in his explanations, you need to think about a lot of things. You need to think it's not just about transliteration. This is way insufficient. It's about summoning a series of connotations through these characters. And these connotations, of course, are going to talk about your brand, what truly is your brand. But also it's the beginning of your positioning, because you're going to make a decision, you're going to choose between multiple possibilities, as Vladimir noticed and insisted one character, not one character. One sound can have multiple characters, but the choice of character will already be the beginning of a decision on how you want to position in China.
38:06
Speaker 3
So in this sense, it's really the way you. It's your go to market, it's your first step in your go to market.
38:13
Speaker 1
You're right. And we can show some examples.
38:19
Speaker 2
We have an example maybe for hsbc. Vladimir, you may want to talk about it.
38:23
Speaker 1
Yes. So HSBC, you know, about being an embodiment of the brand for the. The local market. Talk about hsbc, you know, coming back to China, the acronym means Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Corporation. So you're already very close to the market, but they choose in Chinese not to be called Xiang Shanghai. It's like Xiāngnài’ér (香奈儿) in Chinese, and it's a name that talks about to amass or to. To get the convergence of wealth and richness. So it's talking to a very practical benefit of a bank of getting wealth, accumulating wealth. So this is an interesting story of like how brand that comes from China and have been developing in the west and becoming almost a Western iconic brand when they come back from China.
39:23
Speaker 1
You reinterpret yourself and you make yourself actually relevant to the market because you don't want to compete with the Shanghai bank that is local, that is called Shanghai bank to be very close to you. And that has very. At the time when HSBC entered because was having much lower standard than hsbc. So in order to position your brand and not be competing in the wrong space, the name can help you start from the right away.
39:57
Speaker 2
The other example maybe that we can talk about is MasterCard.
40:00
Speaker 1
Yeah. Another one that we can dream about and we can feel like how we can make yourself relevant in a very striking, strong way to talk about the benefit because MasterCard not too bad in English, MasterCard, it's a good card. But in Chinese, Wànshìdá (万事达). I mean then we get to read something much more thrilling because it's, as you know, Wànshìdá in Chinese. Chinese means 10,000 things and da means achieve. So the name in Chinese means literally achieve 10,000 things. 10,000 In Chinese is the highest number in the decimal system, 10 more than in the West. Everything is a bigger scale in China, of course, so the decimal system. And then when you reach 10,000 you reach the infinite way, you know.
40:49
Speaker 1
And that means that the name said not only that you can reach 10,000 things, but actually that you can reach anything with this card. So it's very inspiring and it reads very well, very smoothly, very easy to remember. So great name. They can then remove the English. They can only use the icon. They did that actually. I mean globally. But I think the Chinese name will state like a strong imp.
41:18
Speaker 2
So you are kind of announcing the number six. The reason number six becoming part of the Chinese culture, you know, brand without Chinese names runs the risk of being perceived as brand that is distant from the Chinese consumers.
41:36
Speaker 1
Yeah, I choose for talking about this point luxury brands because the topic of having a Chinese name for luxury brands is often where it epitomise the topic of like, do we need a Chinese name or not? Often the luxury brands say, well, you know, we want to stay true to our origin. And there is also 20 years ago, you know, when the conception it has been changing progressively that the less Chinese identity you bring to a name, the more you will have a form of aspirational value to Chinese. And we still have a little bit of this thinking sometime when with our client.
42:19
Speaker 1
I'm sharing here some of the phenomena of a pioneer Brand I think Louis Vuitton I mean not a client of me but I must praise their strategy because the two picture here are taken about a few years apart the one on the top is maybe in the beginning of the 2010 years like seven, eight years ago and you can see the use of Louis Vuitton and below you have the Chinese name those are large advertising industry the one on the top billboard I think this one is actually, I think taken in airport the one below is taken on Nanjing West Road and actually just where the heart of the luxury malls are and I was very impressed to see that in 201314 to see this Lùyì Wēidēng (路易威登) and Liu Xing Shi the Gendi this is the tagline we have like few and as you are if you don't read Chinese and if you don't have good eyesight you can't even see the LV on the bag that is very small on the blue bag there is the buckle the closing part is the monogram but if you don't have this very good eyesight you can't get its Louis Vuitton and I think this is actually showing how a luxury brand is actually getting closer to the heart of the customers by communicating in Chinese they don't do this all the time but they do it some time and more actually and on the digital touch point more and more actually more than on the billboards so very interesting and Louis Vuitton for the story it's quite a transliteration but a transliteration with a few asperities in terms of quality of the name because the Louis is a quite common translation of Louis but it happens that Louis in that case means the road and the travel, the journey which is very linked, which links to the baggageist type of heritage of Louis Vuitton and then the end is actually all about the ascension which is a bit about what you get with when you afford luxury It's a bit of this type of elevation feeling be it social, be it way of prestige.
44:53
Speaker 1
Yeah Experiential as well.
44:55
Speaker 2
Yeah thank you. Yeah thank you for all these examples and now it's time to conclude, to summarise so what are the benefits of a Chinese brand name? Sandrine Zerbib, can you maybe start with the first idea?
45:17
Speaker 3
Yeah, I think Vladimir organised these benefits very well. First it empower your consumers to find, to recognise and to remember and talk about your brand easily and if you don't have this Chinese name it will have a difficulty to mention it and therefore it will not talk so Comfortably about your brand. And we know that today consumers have the power to talk about your brand much more than advertising actually. Second, of course there are all the legal aspects that we discussed. It's not sufficient to register your alphabetical brand. You absolutely need to register your Chinese name or what a Chinese name that you have worked on because otherwise someone will create it, will register it and might actually create serious troubles for you that may cost you money and eight to ten years of lawsuits. Maybe you want to continue.
46:22
Speaker 1
Sure. I think on the third point is about to distinguish your brand from similar brands. We talk about the dilution, we want to avoid that. So yeah, sometimes you have similar English names, logos, products. A Chinese name really gets you very visible in the crowd. Very good way to understand and to be remembered. And point four, one of the benefits is to attract more Chinese customer with a good name that please them and also that they can share. Point five, to reinterpret the problem, to reinvent. If you want your brand in a way that it fits the Chinese culture and the business environment, it means that you don't want necessarily to reinvent something that is not true for yourself, but actually to just find a way to be more relevant and more closer to the culture.
47:22
Speaker 3
Yeah. And of course all six reasons are equally important. There is no doubt about this. But as a specialist of E commerce and in the context of our webinar, which is scrapbooking code of E commerce in China, I would say that one in five are absolutely essential. And I want to reinsist on these two. Number one, nowadays you need to let consumers talk about you. And if you forget this or if you don't give them the right way of talking about you're going to lose a lot. Number two, your name is also a way of positioning your brand. Your Chinese name is a way of positioning your brand in this Chinese market. And this is equally essential. As we said earlier, it's this first step in making a statement on who you are for the Chinese consumers.
48:11
Speaker 2
Yeah. Question for you, Vladimir Djurovic. Before doing this super interesting webinar, how do you create a name?
48:22
Speaker 1
I think we could create another webinar this question, but we're trying to respond quickly. Do not hesitate to contact me by the way, because tell you more detail. But if you want, in short, there is three. The process to create a name takes about a month to six weeks when we work with our clients and usually we have three important steps. The process one is of course create a name that fits the brand value and to Reflect the brand. But when we do this, we have also to think about the legal availability. So the legal availability of a name in the screen. It's very hard today to register trademark. We know that you can have legal issues. We talk about that if you don't create one, but to create one that, to find one that is good and available is very hard.
49:26
Speaker 1
It's really like a needle in a haystack. As we, as we say, we usually, as we talk about numbers, we create. So for each project we create hundreds. And you will be surprised, I'm not exaggerating thousands of names just to get 10 or 20 candidates that are available. And it's. So this part of the process is very important. It's a volume creation. I mean quality and volume. But volume is very necessary for that. Second thing is that we talk about the language as being written during the whole presentation. But the language is spoken in China and there is many dialects in China. The good thing is that with a Chinese name in China, the good thing is there's only one written language. We are not like maybe india you need to have different languages, but in China only one written language.
50:17
Speaker 1
So only one name in Chinese in a written form, but the same name will be pronounced differently in Cantonese, in Shohannese, in Beijing, or in different dialects in different types of Mandarin. So we usually do a linguistic test that takes about one week to test the different dialects. Because you will have very serious issues in choosing your name if you don't do this objectively and a bit systematically. Because every time you present a name to a new person in your company or in your business partner, everyone react to name. You saw my passion. Every Chinese consumer has maybe half of my passion, at least to these names. And they will then find associations. And sometimes they could find a negative one. But how important is this negative association? That's the thing.
51:08
Speaker 1
If many people, at least two or three recurrent issue, then you should really reconsider that name. So that's the second step, the linguistic change. The last one is in the process that we do is to optimise with the consumer. So we work with research as well to test them. So that's about just ensure the big steps, generating a big amount of names, screening them equally linguistically and in a way optimising them in a marketing way. And for each project we have screening at each step is quite important and we avoid important mistakes at each step.
51:46
Speaker 2
Yeah, so I guess it replies, I mean to make sure that the name works well at the end, you Will do a market study and you will test it with the population. Testing population. Yeah.
52:00
Speaker 1
It could be qualitative research, quantitative research. Both exist mostly for FMCG brands or for B2C brands. And. And yeah, so I think we have another question so I can maybe read the question for everyone is. Or maybe Bruno Grangier wants to read it.
52:21
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean what type of Chinese name tends to work better? Is it a direct phonetic translation or is it a combination? Does it matter?
52:35
Speaker 1
Yeah, I will start and I think we can have different views on this. So just quickly on this. Is that Yamasun or for Amazon or Wayrun for Microsoft. That is very semantic. There's also Oracle, Tiago, that type of spirit, you know, that is very semantic. Or mix like Starbucks. I think there is no universal rule for sure. You can look at different opportunities more broadly. I would say that the purely phonetic name is often like a very safe choice. You don't. No risk, no pain, no gain, no risk. I mean you kind of edge your risk and you don't take too much risk. But then you will not maybe benefit too much out of gains neither. But it could be the right choice for some brands to go more towards that direction because it's maybe hard to find a very brilliant name.
53:34
Speaker 1
It's not always possible to find this excellent name that become. You know, it's actually. And it's becoming more and more difficult these days because of the legal constraint.
53:47
Speaker 2
Yes, and the problem is that when you register a trademark, you will submit your trademark to the office and then after a while they will reject it. So you cannot access to a quick test to know if the name is available. There is no open list, you have to file and then wait for being rejected.
54:09
Speaker 1
So for this you have a way to. So technically speaking we have access to the trademark database so that we can do screenings. But there is one blind period of three months. But the number of names that are concerned in this three month period registration is not that big. So it impacts in our case about 1% of the projects. We come up with a surprise that actually was invisible in the trademark database because it was being under revision in the last week. So no one could knew about it. But you could actually always try to reduce the risk. The risk exists and plus you can.
55:00
Speaker 3
Know the availability, not the acceptability. That's the point, that's the issue. You may actually have a name which is available but will eventually be rejected by the trademark office.
55:11
Speaker 2
Sure, of course you can access the database to cheque the evidence, but sometimes the experience shows that brands are filed, then there is rejection. And the reason of the rejection is not so clear.
55:22
Speaker 3
Exactly.
55:23
Speaker 2
So that still remains there.
55:24
Speaker 1
And the practical advice for most of the brands and the companies that are listening is to actually try to register for that reason. Actually two names to have a backup. Because even though we feel that there is a possibility of 99% of chance to get it, there's still 1% of risk. If you get two of them first, you, you edge your risk even lower. You will have, and you will also have a second brand maybe for the future to use, I mean, because a trademark registration lasts 10 years, of course it's better to use it to be guaranteed that it doesn't, you know, cancelled after a period of time. But most of the time it's good to have two trademarks.
56:15
Speaker 1
It helps you to have a backup because you will not wait the trademarks, you don't need to wait the trademark to be fully registered to use it. You can start to use it. And then of course, if you make a big campaign on something that is on shaky grounds, that could be a problem. But if you start slowly, then maybe you can still. You don't need to wait the trademark registration to be active. An application is actually already a very good start.
56:45
Speaker 2
Thank you. Thank you so much. Sonin Zabi. Thank you. Vladimir Djurovic.
56:49
Speaker 3
Thank you to you, thank you to everyone, to the audience and thank you.
56:53
Speaker 2
All to attend our webinar. Comments are welcome. We will soon publish the podcast on our social networks and of course with Sandrine Zerbib, we are working on the next topic. Have a nice evening everybody.
57:07
Speaker 3
Have a nice day. Have a nice evening. Goodbye.
57:19
Speaker 2
I hope you have enjoyed this podcast. It was presented in collaboration between FullJet and Leaf, a law firm based in China. And if you want to know more on how to crack the code of the China E commerce, don't hesitate to Visit our website www.Leaf-legal.com.