Chinese companies go to sea, how to name them?

Does the art of naming have any big impact on the development of the company? What kind of name is better? How to define it? The author of this article introduces in detail the naming methods and art of various characteristics of companies at home and abroad, and analyzes the advantages of several classic company/product name cases. Recommended for children's shoes that are interested in product operation and corporate culture.

Naming is an art, and most company names, like people's names, carry good wishes for celebrities (of course, there are also strange names for successful business registration).

In the wave of globalization, whether it is a company or a product, in addition to the native name, it is equally important to have a memorable English name. Compared with simple and direct names such as Apple, Inc., Meta Platforms, Inc. or Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the names of Chinese enterprises are basically translated in accordance with the "Implementation Measures for the Administration of Enterprise Name Registration" issued by the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, and are translated in the order of administrative division, trade name, industry and organizational structure.

Under such rules, the company name starts with the name of the city in a uniform manner, which has become a beautiful scenery in overseas exhibitions. Recall that in 2018, when Chinese companies entered the heyday of CES, more than 1,500 Chinese companies participated in the exhibition, accounting for 1/3 of the total exhibitors.

Source: Screenshot of Quartz's website

Like all tech journalists, Mike Murphy, then Quartz reporter, pored over the list of exhibitors. He was surprised to find that nearly 500 companies in this A-Z list begin with "Shenzhen." Curiosity drove him to look up other Chinese cities, and not surprisingly, there were many companies starting in Beijing, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Pearl River Delta – a "I don't understand, but I'm shocked" moment exclusive to Mr. Mack.

So he scrambled to the bizarre conclusion that Chinese Chinese companies at CES love putting their hometowns in their names. Anyone who has some slight understanding of the "Provisions on the Administration of Enterprise Name Registration" and the "Implementation Measures for the Administration of Enterprise Name Registration" that have been exercised in the mainland for many years will scoff at Mr. Mack's article.

Of course, this misunderstanding also exposes a problem, that is, in most cases, ordinary foreigners really cannot know from the name what is the difference between Shenzhen Aeon Technology Co., Ltd and Shenzhen Anet Technology and Shenzhen Aita Technology.

In fact, the mainland's "Implementation Measures for the Administration of Enterprise Name Registration" does not have mandatory requirements on how to translate the company's trade name, and it does not even need to be reported to the administrative authority for industry and commerce for approval, so "Zhengsheng" is translated into Aeon, "Ainent" becomes Anet, and only Aita is written in pinyin as "Aita".

Throwing away the eight shares of the registered name of the enterprise, looking at the Chinese overseas companies, the naming technique is full of flowers - pinyin school, word creation school, there are also group words, and dictionary streams such as TikTok. Pinyin is both straightforward and complex.

Many companies insist on using the Hanyu Pinyin scheme for their own brands, one is the unification of brands at home and abroad, and the other is to clearly indicate the nationality of the company. In fact, many companies such as South Korea's Samsung, Hyundai and Japan are direct roman transcriptions, but the Japanese and Korean romaji lists are formulated according to European and American pronunciation habits, and basically you don't need to learn to spell them out.

Pinyin, on the other hand, uses Roman characters to represent the Chinese pronunciation system, and it is difficult to master pronunciation without basic learning. A better Haier pronunciation is close to Higher (the Haier name is also derived from Liebherr's Liebeherr, which is itself Spanish). Huawei, a home-grown brand, struggles a little, and Huawei is easy to pronounce "wow" in overseas regions where it swallows h-sounds.

The comparative advantage of pinyin is that it will hardly duplicate names overseas, and the accounts and domain names of some overseas social platforms are relatively easy to register, even if the top .com domain names are preemptively registered, there is a certain chance to get it back through arbitration, such as the famous Tencent application to obtain weixin.com arbitration. Of course, some brands will be prone to ambiguity after transliteration in Chinese Pinyin, so don't use Pinyin directly.

If the pinyin is awkward, some companies also use simple letter combinations (acronyms) as the English company name. There are many post-nasal vowels in Chinese—ang, eng, ing, ong—that challenge Westerners' phonics ability. Especially the continuous posterior nasal rhyme. ZTE's approach is to abbreviate the company's full name, Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment, to ZTE to facilitate reading and writing by overseas users.

Also likely to be phonics disorder is DJI, short for Da Jiang Innovation, which has also created a brand name that impresses people around the world.

Of course, there are also obscure monograms like TCL and BYD, but the original meaning of these trade names has become less important over time and the company's own business growth. The disadvantage of short monogram in the digital age is that it is not easy to register, such as JD.com, which is also a double back nasal rhyme mother, allegedly spent 30 million yuan in order to get the JD.com, but in retrospect, the investment is quite worth it.

There are actually many coined words used by Chinese overseas businesses, mainly because they will not duplicate their names, and there are also good considerations for registering domain names and social media accounts. The source of Temu should be the platform slogan Team up, price down, similar to the meaning of the parent company "Pinduoduo", so Temu should be pronounced tea-moo.

But the problem is that there are many pronunciations of the English vowels e and u, resulting in people with different pronunciation habits unable to unify, different Temu haul videos, everyone's pronunciation is different, and even some people directly pronounce T-E-M-U. In the face of such a situation, it is actually necessary for enterprises to provide users with the correct spelling method on the introduction page or in obvious places.

TEMU's N reading methods are also worth learning from: the experience of foreign companies. Mazda's English name Mazda originally came from the surname Matsuda, the founder Shigejiro Matsuda, in order to be short and cool, hard-wired Iran's god of light, Ahura Mazda; Canon's Canon is a shortening of Kannon (because founder Goro Yoshida is a devout Buddhist); Nikon is an abbreviation for Nippon Kogaku; Nissan Nissan is an abbreviation for Nippon Sangyo in Japan.

In Europe, Leica in Germany is a combination of founder Ernest Leitz's surname and camera in English; Lego in Denmark is a Danish combination of "leg godt" for "fun". And the famous Kodak Kodak is a completely invented name; IKEA is the initials of founder Ingvar Kamprad and his birthplace Elmtary Agunnaryd.

If there are no good ideas, turning dictionaries and word groups is also a good choice. OnePlus is a very successful name, and their product is as simple as the name, simple and powerful. SHEIN's predecessor is Sheinside, specializing in women's wedding dresses, after the name change to achieve great success, She+In concisely expounds the main service objects and brand connotations, phonics is relatively easy, but some people read it consecutively, some people don't.

When it comes to turning to the dictionary name, Luo Yonghao should be a master, and the experience of an English teacher has indeed provided very rich name inspiration for the company and products he stands on. The English name of the hammer mobile phone, Smartisan, is a combination of smart and artisan, which is a very classic interpretation of the craftsman spirit.

It is worth mentioning that the product names handled by Lao Luo are basically word combinations, such as the official English name of bullet text messages Bullets Messenger, and the use of singular and plural numbers in the name alone is enough to dwarf the Chinese and foreign media of a mouthful of "Bullet Message". In addition, Luo Yonghao's Ono (a variant of wild), Sharklet (meaning small shark), and Reloading Peacemaker all have good English names, and the meaning even exceeds Chinese.

Reloading actually introduced a lot of "imitation shoes" that entered the public domain design, which should also mean reloading, and the English word "peacemaker" is added, which is also a euphemism to express the product's attitude towards imitation and tribute.

The most famous dictionary name in recent years is TikTok, Tick-tock is tick-tock, and a variant of this word, Tik Tok, first became popular in 2009 as the 2009 American female singer Ke$ha's self-titled charting song. The advantage of the name TikTok is that it is so easy to spell, no matter what your native language is, the pronunciation of this word is almost the same in most languages, and in 2017, when the word resources have been carved up, there is no name more global and universal.

At this year's CES, we saw the gradual recovery of the number of Chinese companies, and also saw many emerging overseas companies. A good name can also enhance a company's brand power and image, better than a story with a thousand words. The names SHEIN and TikTok themselves reflect the company's global ambitions, and what could be remembered more by more people?