International Women’s Day came and went about a month ago, March 8. If you are living in the US, you could be forgiven for having missed it — the holiday doesn’t have much pull there, as I remember it. But here in China you can’t miss it. International Women’s Day everywhere. TV, subway posters, billboards… The holiday has taken on …
Being Microsoft
All I can think is that Steve Ballmer had a Bing fetish? Or maybe they’d spent gazillions on the domain name? Or Microsoft had not a single Chinese speaker within three degrees of separation from the board room? Yes, the leading paragraph is all uptalk, which I don’t generally do. The point of the diffident uptalk is that we can …
Baidu the Girly Du
A case study in donkey name reaction So far we’ve only talked about donkey names for foreign brands , but China’s mocking netizens have never limited their targets to foreign-owned enterprises. Baidu, the 800 pound gorilla of Chinese search, was slapped with “Dùniáng” (度娘) a few years back when netizens got upset about its forum practices.* How to translate Dùniáng? It’s …
Donkey names, pube names
Speaking of donkey names, the mocking names given to famous brands in China, I forgot to mention one other coining we’d considered: Pube name Right. Ugh. Pubes. It kind of comes with the territory. The Chinese internet is famously creative with its crude metaphors. So at least one wag has combined the common internet way of referring to oneself as …
Flee your dolt name
You’ve heard us talk about donkey names, and how devious punning gets applied to pretty much every brand in China. Being known as the donkey brand hasn’t hurt Louis Vuitton, you’re thinking, so maybe this whole “naming risk” thing is a little overstated. Well, consider for a moment the Benz that’s getting dusted off this fine spring morning in some …
Donkey Names
Many a brand manager has the donkey name nightmare… It’s the day after your big China launch. The marketing coordination has been superb. The PR team’s efforts have resulted in quality TV coverage of your highest profile events. Each t has been crossed and each i dotted. Customers have been lining up for product and out-of-stocks have been negligible. …