Booming Chinese Tourism
During the last few decades, particularly after China’s entrance into the World Tourism Organization (WTO), more and more people fancied the idea of travelling outside the country. In 1995, the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) predicted that China would generate 100 million outbound travelers by 2020, making it the fourth largest market in the world (UNWTO Tourism 2020 Vision).

As the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games are approaching, sport and sport brands have been drawn under the eyes of the whole world. Sport brands, whether sponsors of the Games or not, are striving to capitalize on this opportunity to associate their image with the Olympics. This is even truer for local companies which intend to exploit this worldwide event to enhance their image not just at home but also abroad...

"Legend" became Lenovo, "太太药业" (tài tài yào ye) became "健康元" (jiàn kāng yuán): brand renaming has become a recent trend. Why did these brands choose to change the names they worked so hard to market?Were these choices brilliant strategic coups or fatal marketing miscalculations?

 AVON (雅芳)，Avene (雅漾)，Yanor（雅娜), what differences do these cosmetic brands sound to you? Which one sounds more beautiful? For every company or product which needs a proper Chinese name, it is always a question whether the Chinese name should be phonetically adapted or not...

Do you prefer a "Shanghai Commonage"(*) or a "Beijing Modern Times"(**)? We start our journey in Car naming with some overview of what is really displayed on the car seen on the streets of China...

A heated debate has recently taken place regarding Google's new Chinese name 谷歌 "GuGe" (The two characters mean "valley song" or "harvest song"). One can wonder what really happened and why their new name stirred up so much controversy...

A heated debate has recently taken place regarding Google's new Chinese name 谷歌 "GuGe" (The two characters mean "valley song" or "harvest song"). One can wonder what really happened and why their new name stirred up so much controversy...

Historically, Chinese characters originated from the symbolic representation of the objects they described. For example, the representation of the mouth kou is口, that symbolize an opened mouth. This word 口is used in Chinese names of famous brands for example Coca Cola (可口可乐)...

 Numbers are not that common in Chinese brands but they do exist in brands such as 'Beijing 2008' or the Chinese liberation army's Ǝ-1'. In those cases they represent a date or a year, but they can also represent branded addresses such as Ɖ on the bund', or lucky numbers like 鰿 pharmaceuticals'. However, the most interesting way to use numbers in brands is to express words resembling or homonymous to the chosen numbers, for instance 5 (wo/wu) for 'I, nothing, dance', 1 (yao,yi) for 'want, medicine' and 9 (jiu) for 'longevity, wine' etc...