Identity and Differentiation
Brand switching is common in China. Consumers are fickle because they now have a lot more choices than they had a decade before. Furthermore, many brands have not done an adequate job of identifying and understanding their core markets in order to target them effectively.

Buick is an example of a brand that faltered despite a strong debut. When Buick was first introduced in China, it was presented as the vehicle of choice for the crème de la crème of society. Pu Yi, the last Emperor of China, was shown in its ads to have possessed a Buick in the 1920s. Similar ads were run of Chinese leaders like Sun Yat-sen and Zhou Enlai. The brand became an instant hit and Buick quickly began to sell more vehicles in China than in the US.

Pu Yi, China's Last Emperor, drove a 1932 Buick Tudor

To take advantage of this growth, Buick started selling lower-end models in China. Although sales boomed initially, it went into a decline soon after. This was because corporate chieftains did not want to drive the same car as middle-class or first-time buyers. The latter group were also dissatisfied, as they thought they were buying into the Buick brand and Buick quality but the watered-down version did not meet their expectations.

At the end of the day, no one knew what Buick stood for. Was it high-end or low-end? One size does not fit all in China and a well-thought about strategy is definitely needed there.

Local Relevance
A brand has to fit into the preferences and lifestyle of the target market before it can be embraced by it. Wall’s found that people in China generally do not eat desserts through its initial research. So when the company launched its Vienetta ice cream in the market, it repositioned the product as a shared experience and special treat for aspiring young professionals who wished to connect with the symbols of international success.

Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) went a step further by constantly updating its menu to appeal to the market. The highly localised menu includes congee or Chinese-style porridge for breakfast; Beijing Chicken Roll (à la Beijing Duck) served with scallion and seafood sauce; and Spicy Diced Chicken, which resembles a popular Sichuan-style dish. This has won them a large and loyal following in China. With more than 2,000 outlets in the country, KFC has a 2:1 ratio over MacDonald’s here. Outside of China, it is the other way round in most countries.

Connecting with Consumers
Branding is a highly symbolic form of communication. It often draws upon associations to infer upon the brand a certain quality. In China, a different set of cultural associations has to be adopted.

Clarins for instance struggled with sales of its male grooming products because it did not treat China as a separate market. Leveraging on its international advertising, it presented ethnically diverse, metrosexual models to local consumers. Already nervous that caring about their appearance means they are not manly, Chinese males were put off by Clarins’ advertising campaign. They could not relate to the models and had no desire to look like them.

Other brands also failed with advertising campaigns featuring blonde preppy models lounging on yachts. Unlike the West, yachts and the Hamptons were not in the popular imagination in China.

In contrast, L’Oréal successfully promoted its male cosmetic brand Biotherm by leveraging on Korean movie stars. At a time where Korean movies and pop music is highly popular in China, these stars carried a look, style and personality that Chinese men aspired to and Chinese women wished their boyfriends had.

Like  most other countries, China presents its share of challenges for brands entering its market. More than just language, a strong understanding of the people – their habits, preferences, desires, identities, aspirations – is crucial in making the emotional connection that is part of the branding process.

Furthermore, China is more similar to Europe than the US, where strong regional differences in language and culture exist. Companies hoping to establish substantial presences in china are well advised to invest as much in consumer research as their marketing and promotion efforts.

SPBA 2010 Winner - Promising Brands

SPBA is jointly organized by the Association of Small and Medium Enterprises and Lianhe Zaobao and was established to recognize deserving Singapore brands that have been developed and managed effectively through various branding initiatives.

This award will be marked as one of Verztec Consulting’s significant milestones; an affirmation of Verztec’s strong branding efforts. Verztec Consulting would like to take this chance to thank the customers who have grown with them through the years and will continue to work towards greater milestones. For more information about the awards, please visit the SPBA website.

Covering this would take an entire tome of a book. Perhaps we should “begin at the beginning” with the brand name and logo. Why do some succeed where others have failed spectacularly in their branding? Past forays of Western pioneers provide good insight into the market.

A Rose by Another Name Does Not Always Smell As Sweet
People often form their first impression of a brand from its name. The name also influences how they think about a brand later on and connect with it emotionally. Thus, a proper translation of the name can lead to a successful penetration of a market.

But first, how are brand names translated in China? Basically there are three ways. The first is a literal translation. For instance, Microsoft was rebranded as “微软” , with “微” denoting micro and “软”, soft.

The second is phonetic. A Chinese name that sounds like the English one is chosen. Ikea is known as “宜家” (Yi Jia) and Samsung, “三星” (San Xing) in China.

The last way is to express a similar image or concept in Chinese. Shell Oil is recognized as “贝壳” (shell) while Wrigley’s is “箭牌” (arrow brand). Sometimes, a combination of these devices is used. Coca Cola’s Chinese name, “可口可乐” , is phonetic. At the same time, it is also a conceptual translation because the name means “allowing the mouth to rejoice”.

The brand names that strike a chord with Chinese consumers are those that call attention to the brand value. An example is Mercedes Benz, which was rebranded as “奔驰” (speed ahead). Its competitor BMW, known as “宝马” (precious horse), has managed to endear itself to this market as well.

Like in other markets, brand names that arouse positive emotions perform very well in China. Carrefour, one of the most popular foreign supermarket chains here, is known as “家乐福” (Family Fortune and Happiness). Its success can no doubt be partly attributed to its name, which refers to a happy and fortunate family. In a country where life is centered around kin and kith, the name reaches out effectively to the market the brand is targeting.

Brand names can further confer positive values to a brand. The Chinese name of Full Mark, a hotel, is “福 满客”, which implies it is always fully-booked and guests have high praise or full marks for the place. Similarly, Hyundai is seen as a technologically advanced company through its name, “现代”, which means modern in Chinese.

The Other Side of the Looking Glass

Logotypes present another challenge for foreign brands in China. The meaning represented in the image may not always carry over due to differences in cultural associations. Quaker Oats was affectionately adopted by the Chinese market as “老人牌” (old man brand), but Polo Ralph Lauren’s polo player was nicknamed “三脚马” (three-legged horse), which carried none of the classic affluence and prestige the brand conveyed in the West.

Imagine this happens to your company, except in Chinese. The ridicule and derision heaped on your brand may be something it might never recover from in China.

Nestle was one brand that successfully tapped into the China market by aligning its branding to the cultural values of the country. The image of a female sparrow breeding its young in its logo evokes warm feelings of parental love in the market. This was well-received in a society where the concept of filial society is held in high regard.

To look at this issue from the opposite perspective, hilarious brand names in badly translated English can be found all over the world.

China may be a land of opportunities, but make sure you have the right localization team behind you before you venture into it!

Now that the internet has become a permanent fixture of modern life, companies can no longer market their products and services in the same way as they used to. The internet has changed how information is received and how people expect to communicate with other individuals and groups. It follows that the way that promotional messages are disseminated has to adapt accordingly.

To start with, information flow is no longer one way. We are no longer passive recipients of advertisements and other marketing materials. If we do not like a product or service, we can inform the whole world through the World Wide Web. Instead of telling people what to expect or prefer, companies now have to interact with potential customers and respond to them.

Therefore, new tactics have to be deployed to ensure your company is reaching out effectively to its target market.

Personal Communication
On the Internet, people want to talk to another person, not a company. Marriott CEO Bill Marriott has an entertaining blog in which he posts regular updates and stories from his travels to Marriott properties around the world.

IBM did not create just one blog. The company created an entire network of blogs by getting its employees to write about what interests them, what they are working on and any other random topic. In this way, IBM provided insight on what happens behind the scene by picking the brains of its employees. Consumers were not only able to feel more involved with the company, they were also given a direct connection with IBM employees. In turn, the employees were able to feel the importance and relevancy of their work and to understand what customers want and value.

Transparency
With direct and personal access to company personnel come expectations of transparency. If consumers are connecting to real people, they also want the real story, not some marketing speak manufactured for them.

Sun Microsoft CEO, Jonathan Schwartz has a blog that receives 400,000 hits a month. One of the reasons why it was successful was because it was open. Negative comments are allowed along with positive ones. Even the most inane ones were approved. The transparency shown by Schwartz built trust among visitors of his blog and they responded by becoming loyal followers.

Ford was able to leverage on transparency on social media to avert a potential public relations disaster. When the company’s legal department sent out letters to forum owners to request them to stop using Ford trademarks in the materials posted on their website, it caused misunderstandings and ill-feelings towards the company. Fortunately, Ford’s Community Manager Scott Monty was quick to detect these sentiments and manage the issues. He presented Ford’s side of the story and let everyone know what was happening every step of the way as agreements and compromises were ironed out.  Despite the internal gaffe, Monty was able to rally the online community around Ford rather than against it.

Showing You Care
Starbucks showed that its customers truly know best with its My Starbucks Idea website.

Suggestions can be submitted to this website for voting by Starbucks consumers. The most popular ones are reviewed by the staff. This is an idea that almost every company has. But Starbucks introduced a fresh spin to it by adding an “Ideas in Action” blog that provides updates on the status of the changes suggested. The blog showed that Starbucks recognized how savvy their consumers are. It exemplified the company’s commitment to continual innovation and to delivering what their customers want.

Comcast was able to show their customers how much they matter through their @comcastcares Twitter account. Run by the affable Bill Gerth instead of a nameless faceless customer service rep, the account provides help and advice to users in need. What Comcast does particularly well is the way it manages customer dissatisfaction through Twitter. Complain about the company and you can be sure you will hear from Gerth and his team immediately, and with warmth and empathy. The comcastcares team presents itself not as a company, but friends who exchange messages regularly with other Twitter users, sometimes with details of their personal life.

People not Products
With the shift from the impersonal to the personal, communications now have to be built around people rather than products. Companies are becoming increasingly sophisticated in engaging and adding value to customers through online communities.  On top of a variety of social media platforms, Dell has an island in Second Life. Through the HSBC Business Network, HSBC put entrepreneurs in touch with each other via blogs, videos and online forums.

Making It Fun and Interesting
Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” series on Youtube is legendary. In these videos, the CEO Tom Dickson attempts to blend all kinds of objects in the food processors the company sells. With the fresh and original idea behind the campaign, the low cost videos were a huge hit. They eventually led to a five-fold increase in sales.

At the end of the day, branding is all about creating and maintaining a consistent feeling of familiarity, trust, reliability and confidence with the targeted public. With the paradigm shift in how people use and interact with technology, the rules on how to nurture these feelings have also changed. Will your company be a winner or loser in the Social Media Age? It all depends on how well you continue to engage your customers in your branding.

Brand name
Examples abound of companies who performed poorly in another market because of the wrong choice of name. One of them is General Motors. When it launched the Chevrolet Nova in South America, it was unaware that “no va” means “it won’t go”. After the company figured out why its cars were not selling, the vehicle was renamed “Caribe” in Spanish markets.

Brand values
What one culture values may not be held in high regard by another. To succeed in a particular market, it is imperative that the brand value of a product or service is in sync with the cultural values of the population. When BMW presented images of status or success in its marketing campaigns in New Zealand, it found that these generated little to no interest in its cars. The company realized that this is because New Zealand has a highly egalitarian society where the pursuit of status holds little appeal. On shifting the focus to the quality of its engineering, BMW was able to generate more sales in this market.

Brand presentation
Cultural conventions will determine how your market responds to messages. The color of a logo may have positive connotations in one market and negative ones in another. The same applies to symbols used and the tagline that accompanies the logo. Furthermore, a more informal communication style works better in some markets.

Montblanc for instance customizes its letterheads and invitation cards in different states in India. They not only translate the text into the local language but also vary the colors and amount of decoration used. This is because consumers in northern states like Punjab expect a more lively tone and lavish presentation as compared to their counterparts in the south. In making such adjustments, Montblanc ensured that it was connecting more closely to each market in India.

Writing the right copy
There is a good reason why the literati applaud whenever a new, improved translation of a great foreign novel is released. The work of maintaining the nuance, connotation and mood of the original language takes knowledge and skill.

Therefore, direct translations of brand messaging are often ineffective, if not downright disastrous. Kentucky Fried Chicken’s “finger-lickin’ good” slogan was so poorly translated in China that it came out as “eat your fingers off”.

To communicate effectively in a new market, a brand has to first find the right words to best convey who it is, what it does and why customers should care. Therefore, keyword selection should be the first step in localizing any marketing content.

As analogies are often used to confer certain qualities to a brand, it is also worth investigating whether the concept or entity being compared is understood or valued in the same way in the new market. In the US for example, “capitalist” is a widely accepted word, even a way of life. However, Forbes magazine’s effort to promote its “Capitalist Tool” credit cards was met with a negative response in Indonesia. This was because capitalism was an alien, even taboo, concept in this country.

Ideally, the translator of the content is not only an expert linguist but also a subject matter expert. This is because the translation of marketing materials involves an interpretation of the essence of the message. On top of distilling the message, the translator has to identify the key elements and present them in a manner that the target market will respond to. Without an understanding of the industry, it would be difficult if not impossible for the translator to achieve this.

Translating the images
If a picture is worth a thousand words, whatever it says has to be translated as well. Like words, photos can contain a host of political, social and economic landmines. Compaq was ordered by the authorities to redo an ad campaign in China because the map on its posters did not show Hong Kong and Taiwan as part of China. Pepsi was sued in India for glorifying child labor when it ran a television ad showing a young boy serving its drink to the Indian cricket team.

Images often reflect social hierarchy and relationships between people, groups, and entities. Given that these vary from country-to-country, the content of the images must therefore be adapted accordingly.

With the availability of translation engines on the internet, does this mean we can now communicate effectively in a new language with the click of a button?

As the companies below have found out the hard way, localization projects not only require proficiency in the target language but also a thorough understanding of the culture. Here are some pitfalls to look out for:

1. Slang
Matsushita Electric was promoting a new PC for internet users and commissioned Panasonic to produce an online guide for this purpose.  A huge marketing campaign was built around the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker after license to use it was granted. However, the launch had to be cancelled at the last minute.

The reason? The ads featured the slogan, “Touch Woody – The Internet Pecker”.  An American at the internal product launch had explained to the stunned and embarrassed Japanese what “touch woody” and “pecker” meant in American slang.

2. Pronunciation of names and abbreviations
When General Electric Company (GEC) and Plessey combined to create a new telecommunications giant in the 1980s, it decided on using GPT (the short form of GEC-Plessey Telecommunications) as the new name. Unfortunately, this branding proved to be a big disaster in Europe. GPT is “Jay-Pay-Tay” when pronounced in French. This sounds like “J’ai pete”, which means “I have farted”.

In a similar case, Wang, the American computer company, could not understand at first why its British branches were refusing to use its latest motto “Wang Cares”. To British ears, this sounds too close to “wankers”. Of course, it is of no surprise that the staff did not want to be identified in this manner!

3. Cultural associations
Mazda introduced a minivan called Laputa in the Japanese market in 1991. Because of the popular Japanese animated film “Laputa: Castle in the Sky”, the name had a positive association here. However, Spanish speakers would immediately think of “puta”, the word for prostitute.  In this light, advertisements claims that “Laputa is designed to deliver maximum utility in a minimum space while providing a smooth, comfortable ride” and possesses “a lightweight, impact-absorbing body” are humorous, if not inappropriate.

The vehicle was subsequently renamed when it was sold in Latin America.

4. Using the wrong term
When Parker Pen launched a ballpoint pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to say “it won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you”. However, the Spanish word “embarazar” was mistakenly used to mean embarrass. The ads actually said “it won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant”.

5. Double meanings
Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux entered the American market with the slogan, “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux”. With the poor choice of verb, its advertisements were more effective in driving away customers than attracting them.

6. False language pairs
Though some words are used across different languages, their meaning often varies in each language. An example of such false language pairs is the word “mist”. In German, it refers to manure. Whisky company Irish Mist was apparently unaware of this when it marketed its product with the semi-Germanized name Irischer Mist in Germany. Sales for the product was expectedly poor, because few of the locals wanted to drink Irish dung.

7. Unfortunate word combinations
No, www.powergenitalia.com is not a porn website. It’s the website of Powergen Italia, an Italian maker of battery chargers. On the World Wide Web, whatever that sounds normal in one language does not necessarily translate well into another.

In short, it is not enough for translators to ensure grammatical accuracy and stylistic and syntactical appropriateness. A cross cultural analysis is also required in customizing a product, documentation or advertising to suit the conventions and market requirements of the target country.