Chinese brand naming from general principles to specific rules
Chinese brand naming: from general principles to specific rules
Yue Yuan Huang Allan K.K. Chan
6,338 words
1 November 1997
International Journal of Advertising
320
Vol. 16, No. 4, ISSN: 0265-0487
English
COPYRIGHT 1997 Advertising Association
INTRODUCTION
A brand name is the identification of a particular product or service. It is among the most important assets which a firm possesses (Aaker, 1991; Aaker & Keller, 1990). Brand names play a crucial role in the marketing of products and services and in their acceptance by the public (Charmasson, 1988), and may contribute significantly to the success or failure of new products or services (Kotler & Armstrong, 1997; Zaltman & Wallendorf, 1979). Recent studies have shown that branding has increasingly become part of an integrated business process (Mosmans, 1995; Rubinstein, 1995). Mosmans (1995) further argues that the focus now is on value creation rather than product creation, and one of the most important tasks of a firm is to build brand concept that drives the business.
Brand names play an even more significant role in Asian countries. Robinson (1995), for example, points out that many Asian packaged goods markets are characterized by an unusual level of single brand dominance. Very often one brand can account for 40-50 per cent market share and can hold this share position for many years. So entrenched are some brands that in many instances they have become the category. This phenomenon of significant brand dominance and entrenched market shares has been attributed to shared Asian cultural values. Based on Hofstede's multicultural attitude survey in 1980, Robinson (1995) summarizes three key cultural dimensions to account for this brand loyalty in Asian markets: power distance, recognition and uncertainty avoidance (for details, see Robinson, 1995: 56-58).
Creating a powerful brand name is a very important process in the business. Studies on branding have focused on the guideline criteria for developing effective brand names: the short length, the ease of pronunciation, the packaging needs, the adaptability to advertising medium, and so on (Charmasson, 1988; Collins, 1977; McCarthy & Perreault, 1987; McNeal & Zeren, 1981; Shipley et al., 1988). These studies have been largely conducted in Western countries, such as in the USA and Europe, and on the products which are branded in Western European languages. However, recent studies have found that language difference is critically important in the international environment and may cause major barriers to international market entry to some countries, such as Japan (Simon & Palder, 1987; Cravens et al., 1987). McDonald and Roberts (1990) start to question the applicability of Western brand naming models in the Asia Pacific context. However, few studies focus on how culture and linguistic diversity is related to brand naming.
This study investigates the Chinese brand system by analysing the brand names of a representative sample of award-winning products in the People's Republic of China (referred to as China hereafter). China is probably the largest consumer market in international business today and the Chinese language differs greatly from Western European languages. Unlike Western European languages, Chinese with a logographic writing system cannot coin a name by scrambling some alphabetic letters as often applied in English naming processes. All Chinese names are constructed from meaningful words; thus the creativity of Chinese brand names reflects certain Chinese cultural values. Asian societies which Robinson (1995) refers to as primarily Confucian-influenced societies share basic cultural values. A good understanding of the attitude of the Chinese people has a direct implication for the understanding of Asian customers.
The focus of this article is on the linguistic nature of Chinese brand naming. There are two specific objectives: to generalize the linguistic principles which govern branding in Chinese, and to categorize the specific branding rules for specific products. The article is divided into four parts. First, we will discuss in detail the criteria for powerful brand names, especially the essential linguistic requirements in branding. Second, we will summarize the general linguistic rules governing Chinese branding based on our recent study of 527 brand names of Chinese award-winning products from Beijing and Shanghai (Chan & Huang, 1997). The third part presents results of our current study on 151 top Chinese brands of two specific categories of products: cosmetic products and bicycles, in order to compare the specific name formation rules for different products. The fourth part is the conclusion. The findings of this study will help local marketers to generate a good Chinese brand name, and international marketers to properly localize an international brand name in Chinese in order to enhance business success in the Chinese market.
THE CRITERIA FOR POWERFUL BRAND NAMES
Many studies have dealt with the criteria for a good and powerful brand name. However, the criteria vary among researchers with respect to the number of items. Kotler and Armstrong (1997) listed five criteria, Collins (1977) named six, McCarthy and Perreault (1987) provided a list of twelve characteristics while McNeal and Zeren (1981) suggested thirteen.(1) There is also a lack of consistency in the terms used for the criteria. For example, McNeal and Zeren used `ease of pronunciation', while McCarthy and Perreault used `easy to spell and read'. In our recent article, we proposed a three-component criterion which captures the generality of the principles in branding (Chan & Huang, 1997). We classified the desirable qualities for a good brand name under three components: marketing, legal and linguistic, as shown in Table 1.
Table 1 A three-component criterion for the development of brand
names
The marketing component
* Suggestive of product benefits
* Promotable, advertisable and persuasive
* Suited to package
* Fits with company image and other products' image
The legal component
* Legally available for use (not in use by another firm)
* Unique in competition
The linguistic component
There are three sub-components:
1 The phonetic requirements
* easy to pronounce
* Pleasing when read or heard
* Pronounceable in only one way and in all languages for goods
to be exported
2 The morphological requirements
* Short and simple
3 The semantic requirements
* Positive, not offensive, obscene, or negative
* Modern or contemporary, always timely
* Understandable and memorable
Source: Chan & Huang (1997)
We argued that the linguistic component is the essence in branding which directly affects the function of brand names. The function of brands is to make the branded products or services recognizable and distinguishable for promotion and selling in the market. A brand competes better when it is legally protected from the adaptation and imitation by any potential competitors. However, the degree of market promotion and legal protection that can be derived from the use of a commercial name depends almost entirely upon the intrinsic characteristics of the syllables, word and phrases (Charmasson, 1988).
The linguistic component in branding consists of three sub-components: phonetic content, morphological content and semantic content. For the products which are intended for the international market, their branding must take linguistic universals into consideration, i.e., the linguistic traits which occur in all or most human languages.
Phonetic requirements
A good brand name is usually easy to pronounce and pleasing when read or heard. Three factors affect the pronunciation of a brand: the choice of speech sounds, the syllable structure and sonority. The choice of sounds can affect the recognition of brand names. Vanden Bergh (1983) found that 46.5 per cent of the top 200 US brands in 1979 started with a plosive.(2) Vanden Bergh et al. (1984) argued that words that began with a plosive were more frequently recalled and more likely to be recognized than words that did not.
Syllable structure is directly related to the ease of pronunciation. Languages differ in syllable structure. Some languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, have very simple syllable structures of CV (C stands for consonant and V for vowel) or CVC, while other languages have a complicated syllable structure with a freedom to consonant clusters. For example, English allows a syllable of CCCVCC (e.g. splint). Consonant clusters cause difficulty in pronunciation not only to the speakers whose language does not allow consonant clusters, but also to the speakers whose language permits the combination of consonants because different languages permit different combinations of consonants. A good brand should avoid such combinations. We analysed the world's most powerful brand names, the top ten brands in United States, Europe and Japan, respectively (for example, Coca-Cola, Sony, Disney, Kodak, Toyota; for details see Kotler & Armstrong, 1997: 249),(3) and found that the predominant syllable structure of this group of brands is CV and CVC. Except for Black & Decker, none of the rest begins with a consonant cluster. Researchers also found that certain syllables may be more preferred than others in a certain speech community. For example, Japanese speakers consider that chi, tsu and pi sounded strong, cheerful and pleasing while zu, da and gu sounded melancholic and dull (Sternberg, 1989).
Sonority affects the pleasantness of names. The degree of sonority depends on speech sounds and tones. Vowels are more sonorous than consonants because vowels are produced with relatively little obstruction in the vocal tract while consonants are produced with a narrow or complete closure in the vocal tract (Fromkin & Rodman, 1993). Tones are related with pitches. Phonetically, high tones mean high pitches; therefore they are more sonorous, while low tones have low pitches with less sonority. In the studies of Chinese personal names, it is found that Chinese personal naming is guided by two criteria: sonorous and meaningful (Huang & Fan, 1994), and the two high tones in Cantonese Chinese are preferably used in the names of Hong Kong Cantonese speakers (Fan & Ng, 1993).
Morphological requirements
The morphological requirement constrains the length of brand names. Naming process in general adopts word formation procedures, such as compounding, affixation, abbreviation, blending, and so on. Languages differ in word formation. Chinese uses compounding in naming, the same process as its word formation. English is different. Carroll's study (1985) showed that native English speakers clearly preferred simple nominals to compound nominate in English names.
Semantic requirements
Semantically, names with positive connotation are overwhelmingly preferred cross-culturally. Positiveness affects the impression of a commercial name on customers. People are more pleased to receive positive input than negative. Another important semantic property in naming is the establishment of a specific semantic framework for a specific category of products. Aronoff (1985) pointed out in his study of American car names that car manufacturers deliberately manipulate the names of car makes and models within automobile semantics for the purpose of the shifts of ranking, and American customers are led to accept the new meanings without notice because the overall conceptual framework remains constant.
Linguistic universals
Linguistic universals are very important for branding the products which are intended for the global market. Language universals regulate what is possible and what is impossible in the structure of a language and provide information on the characteristics which are found in all or most of the world's languages and the characteristics which are not found in any. Following the markedness theory which is often used to analyse linguistic universals, linguistic features which are basic and can be commonly found in many languages are unmarked characteristics while more complex and universally rarer features are marked traits.
In a phonetic system, the unmarked vowels are [a, i, u] which almost every language contains. The unmarked consonants are stops [p, t, k] and the unmarked syllable structure is CV. The interdental fricatives [[Theta], [Differential]] in English as in three, those are the two marked phonemes and difficult for speakers of many other languages who very often use [s, z] or [t, d] to substitute them (for details of language universals, see Greenberg, 1978). To achieve the requirement of `pronounceable in all languages' and `pronounceable in only one way', the brand designers must consider the language universal features and avoid marked sounds and syllables. Imagine importing the French long-established PSCHITT soda pop label into an English-speaking country (Charmasson, 1988:31). Not only may its initial consonant combination psch cause some difficulty for English speakers to pronounce, but its sound which is close to the English word `shit' will very possibly result in negative feeling among English speakers. With respect to semantics, brand designers who are interested in the global market must therefore be aware of homonyms of certain words in different languages in order to avoid embarrassing situations. A positively connoted name in one language may sound offensive in another language.
THE GENERAL LINGUISTIC PRINCIPLES GOVERNING CHINESE BRANDING
Specific features of the Chinese language
The Chinese language differs from Indo-European languages and has the following specific features:
1 Chinese is an isolating language; that is, words in Chinese consist of a single morpheme, and there are only a few affixes in Chinese. A morpheme in Chinese has only one syllable and is represented by one character in the written form. Thus there is a unification: a word, one morpheme, one syllable, one character. The word formation in modern Chinese is mainly through compounding; that is, combining two or more existing words.
2 Chinese has a very simple syllable structure system: CV or CVC.
3 Chinese is a tone language. In Mandarin Chinese, there are four distinct tones. Dividing the pitch range into five levels numbered 1 to 5, where 1 corresponds to the low pitch, 3 to the middle pitch and 5 to the high pitch, we get the following Mandarin tone representation:
Tone 1 (T1) high tone 55
Tone 2 (T2) rising tone 35
Tone 3 (T3) dipping tone 214
Tone 4 (T4) falling tone 51
T1 and T2 have a common feature; that is, both have a high pitch end (5), so we may group them as high tones (H). T3 and T4 are both involved with the lowest pitch (1) in their falling contour and we may group them as low tones (L).(4)
4 All Chinese words including vocabulary used every day, personal names, place names and brand names are all constructed from the same source of meaningful morphemes. There are about 9400 morphemes generally used in Chinese, of which 3500 are frequently used.(5) Most new words or names in modern Chinese are compounded from these 3500 morphemes. However, in English there is an inventory of personal names independent of its lexicon.
The syllabic, semantic and morphological patterns in Chinese branding
Our recent study (Chan & Huang, 1997) analysed 527 brand names of Chinese national award-winning products from two major cities: Shanghai and Beijing. The sample is selected from a corpus entitled Zhongguo Chuangyou Qunxing (The Best Products in China from 1979 to 1988) (1990).(6) The products include textiles, food, industrial products, clothing, daily necessities, pharmaceutical products, and so on. These data were analysed under four linguistic categories: the syllabic structure, the tonic structure, the morphological structure and the semantic structure. The results are summarized in Tables 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Table 2 Syllable structure of brand names in China
Syllables Frequency Percentage Ranking
Two syllables 477 90.50 1
Three syllables 34 6.45 2
One syllable 11 2.10 3
Four syllables 5 0.95 4
Total 527 100
Table 3 Tone structure of brand names in China
Tone patterns Frequency Percentage Ranking
H-H 74 47.13 1
L-H 40 25.48 2
H-L 29 18.47 3
L-L 14 8.91 4
Total 157 100
Table 4 Compounding structure of brand names in China
Compounding types Frequency Percentage Ranking
Noun-noun 272 51.61 1
Adjective-noun 53 10.06 2
Number-noun 48 9.11 3
Verb-noun 36 6.83 4
Other ten types 118 22.39
Total 527 100
Table 5 Semantic structure of brand names in China
Semantic connotation Frequency Percentage Ranking
Positive 348 66.03 1
Neutral 178 33.78 2
Negative 1 0.18 3
Total 527 100
The findings have shown an overwhelming preference (90.5 per cent) to two-syllable (disyllable) names in Chinese branding; that is, the names are compounded by two words. The disyllabism in branding reflects the general syllable preference of Chinese speakers. In modern Chinese, disyllabic compounds make up about 70 per cent of basic vocabulary. Thus two-syllable brand names are easy for Chinese speakers to remember and to recognize. With respect to the tonic structure of two-syllable brands, Chinese speakers especially like high-pitched (H-H) syllables and accept L-H brands very well. H-H combinations (47.13 per cent) and L-H (25.48 per cent) together termed as X-H (X is either H or L) make up to 72.61 per cent of our brand corpus. High-pitched words are sonorous. A combination of L-H can achieve a sonorous effect by ending with a high-pitched sound. The high sonority of names can result in pleasing features in pronunciation. Chinese branding has no restriction in compounding structure and there are altogether fourteen compounding types in our corpus. However, Noun-Noun compounded names (51.61 per cent) is the most favoured combination, followed by adjective-noun, number-noun and verb-noun. These four groups which make up 77.61 per cent in our brand corpus have a common feature of modifier-noun; that is, the second component of the name is a noun and the first functions as a modifier to this noun. Semantically, it is the positive names (66.3 per cent) which are most frequently used. These most preferred linguistic features are summarized in Table 6.
Table 6 The four most preferred patterns
Two-syllable X-H tone Modifier-noun Positive
90.50% 72.61% 77.61% 66.03%
To summarize, Chinese brand names are compounds and the branding is generally governed by four linguistic principles:
* It should be a two-syllable compound.
* The second syllable should be high-pitched.
* The compounding structure should follow the pattern of modifier-noun. The compounded brand should have a positive connotation.
Brands Syllable Tones
hong-qi (car) `red-flag' 2 H-H
bai-mao (detergent) `white-cat' 2 H-H