Did Someone Sanction A Media Hit On Google?

2010-02-01

Something tells me it's huntin' season, and the game of the day is Google. I was perusing China Daily today, as I am fond of doing, and became caught up in an article about foreign companies and Chinese branding. This issue is an old standard in trademark circles as well as the general foreign investment community.

Here's the opening bit:

Overseas technology companies may possess hundreds of reasons for not having a great presence in China but one of the major ones, according to some, may be their local names.

Industry experts say many foreign firms don't pay enough attention to their Chinese names. Some fail to research the culture while others choose characters that put potential customers off.

OK, that's enough to get the attention of this IP lawyer, although I myself have probably written and spoken on this issue over a hundred times — it's kind of all been said before by me and the other usual suspects.

I was interested though to see the word "technology" inserted in there. I thought maybe the article might also address patents or tech transfer, although I failed to see what that had to do with branding.

Imagine my surprise when I got to this passage:

Google, for example, upset a great number of its Chinese fans when the world's largest search engine launched its Chinese brand name "Guge" in 2006. The name, which in Chinese means "harvesting song", was considered by many to sound strange and unsophisticated.

The disaffection drove a group of Google Chinese fans to create a site called noguge.com, aimed at collecting suggestions for alternative names.

"Many Chinese users find it hard to pronounce Google and its Chinese name Guge," said Edward Yu, president of domestic research firm Analysys International. "That partly resulted in a lower brand awareness for US firms in China, especially in third and fourth-tier cities."

Ah, now I get it. This is called piling on, kicking a man when he's down, jumping on the bandwagon . . . you get the idea.

Chinese names of foreign companies is a big issue. Again, I've dealt with this many, many times over the years. I've seen some stupid choices, some great ones, companies that spend very little time and effort in making the choice, while others pay out huge sums of money to PR agencies to ensure that their Chinese name is perfect.

MNCs have gotten pretty responsible about the name choice thing in recent years. The boneheaded moves are usually reserved for SMEs these days. And by the way, this has nothing in particular to do with "technology" companies. I suspect that word was used as a lame excuse to use Google as an example of a tech firm.

Is Google's Chinese name so bad? I don't think so, and most of the people I've talked to say it's fine. Not as good as Coca-Cola's notoriously perfect Chinese name maybe, but it's all right. It definitely could have been worse. I've heard lots of Chinese folks pronounce "Google" using the sound "gou" (i.e. "gu gou") — if Google really sucked, they might have ended up using "狗" (dog). Did Google's name choice "disaffect" a huge number of Chinese "fans"? Um, that's just a ridiculous statement.

If there is one thing the press is good at, it's herd mentality. Google is an official target, so I wouldn't be surprised to see more of this stuff. Perhaps future hit pieces will be slightly better researched and more effective, though.

Tags: China Business & Economy, Intellectual Property