If you ask Chinese internet users, most will be skeptical of Facebook's prospects in the country. The social media market was already dominated by Chinese companies, there seems little left for a new player. Even my fellow Chinese in US spend more time on RenRen, QQ and such than Facebook and Twitter. Understanding the rules and consumer preferences in this lucrative market is difficult as hell. The Chinese are more willing to flock to a domestic copycat of a service innovated by the west, even the copycat was inferior. They will complain about how the domestic version is buggy, lousy, unethical and evil, but still choose it over a western alternative. I have wondered why for quite a few years, and still cannot come up with a logical answer. Yet one example had once offered me part of the explanation. Giant Interactive is a leading online MMO company in China, when they stared their games weren't as good as Korean or US ones; but they sent thousands of employees out and installed their game in countless internet cafes in the second tiers cities across the country, along with their other Chinese dirty tricks, Giant managed to captivate millions of players and secured their revenue stream. The Chinese companies are simply closer to its audience, they can afford to go to their audience, literally face to face. The key to success of almost all local Chinese companies, lies in the millions of outdated computers piled in the cheap rooms of low-class internet cafes in lower-income cities and rural areas: places quite impossible for international companies to reach.
In Chinese, the win sound means plague... so you fill in the blank.
Plague 95, Plague 98, Plague XP.
XP is even funnier, X is pronounced as "Cha" and it means to insert or to penetrate. P is pronounced as "P" which means asshole in Chinese. Again you fill in the blank.
The McDonalds v. Subway battle is exactly the reason why Subway needs a clever name. With McDonalds and KFC dominating the Chinese fast food market, Subway needs a point of differentiation. Fortunately, both of the leaders had chosen mediocre names, which gives Subway a slight advantage.
Just to add to the list, a few other good examples, all meeting the three criterion in the article:
Carrefour is translated as 家乐福(jia le fu), which means family, happiness and fortune. The supermarket chain's success was largely due to the name, 'cause many Chinese people actually think it is a Chinese company.
Pizza Hut as 必胜客(bi sheng ke), which means the winning one; although the name has not link to pizza or food, it helped to shape Pizza Hut as a premium brand.
BMW's brand identity(宝马, bao ma) is known as a prestigious horse; Mercedes-Benz's Chinese name 奔驰(ben chi) means gallop, running with speed, etc. So car manufacturers do have good tasted for their brand names.
Groupon' s newly picked name is 高朋(gao peng), which means classy friends. Also a clever choice.
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One key trend in the name-picking game in the recent years is that more and more companies are trying to make their brands actually MEAN something. Earlier entrants like McDonald's, KFC, Disney, Nike, Adidas, they simply chose a few characters whose combination replicates the sound but is nevertheless meaningless. Why? Because more than a decade ago, having such a name automatically indicates you are a foreign brand, and this is a good thing. People were naturally drawn to such names, they believed foreign products stand for quality and premium experience. Also, early entrants are usually the first in its category to attack the Chinese market, giving them a monopoly position (sort of). For instance, KFC is known as 肯德基, whose brand image is not KFC itself but American Fast Food as a concept.
Yet companies who entered the market after 2000, all tried to attach some implied meaning to a name, or in some other words they all seek localization. The reasons things have changed are: firstly, more and more foreign brands entered the market, the monopoly benefits are no longer; in addition, a lot, I mean really a lot, of local Chinese brands try to mimic the strategy by crowning themselves a foreign title, which dilutes the whole foreign branding concept; finally, a growing number of English speaking population (especially the ones with considerable pocket size) demands difference, they are aware of Starbucks, but mostly remembers the brand as 星巴克, a clever enough translation.
Since we have so many chatbots around and I am pretty sure lots of them adjust and update their databases (perhaps algorithms as well?) based on human inputs. Suppose we keep doing this and let them continue talking for hours, days and even weeks, one of them should gain a unique conversation style and maybe it will surprise we humans in a bizarre way.
As I see it, the goal of AI should not be limited to mimicking human ways of thinking, instead it should aim at blessing the program the ability to learn and evolve. In the latter case, it is reasonable to expect the internal generated intelligence could go beyond the expectations of its human creator. Again, I don't know if anybody has done it before; but it seems a good idea to me.
This was the motivation for my original experiment, glad so many people liked it.
