branding in chinese

Most corporate/brand names are simply not translatable into Chinese. They need to be re-created. Besides, your brand is more than a name, isn’t it?

Lack of awareness of the complexity involved has cost many Western brands millions. There are exceptions though.

You don’t need to know any Chinese to recognize the logo on the left. If you did, you’d know the Chinese phrase sounds ‘Coca Cola’. It means ‘palatable and joyful’. It looks unmistakably Coca Cola.

Sound, Sense and Styling combine to form the brand in Chinese. Coca Cola has 60% of the fizzy drink market in China and increasing. It remains one of the few success stories in branding in China. We use Coca Cola as the benchmark.

There are many challenges. The majority of our clients don’t speak any Chinese. Their Chinese partners tend to focus on the needs in China alone. There may need to be trade-offs between competing considerations. An otherwise excellent name may have already been a registered trade mark in China.

We guide you through the minefield. We provide four levels of service to suite different needs and budgets. They range from the Bronze Service for an absolute budget name to the Platinum Service for a branding project.

For client confidentiality, we’re unable to display the full list of our branding projects. The two examples on this page are good illustrations. Although they’re bi-lingual logos, the Chinese part works equally well as a stand-alone. Like Coca Cola in Chinese.