"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...

 When is a Chinese name necessary? Maybe some people believe that it is not necessary for a foreign brand to be given a Chinese name when it enters China. Take LV as an example, only a few people are aware of its Chinese name “路易·威登”. One can see only ‘LV’ even in the flagship store located in Shanghai. Some people believe that a Chinese name is not necessarily needed even for a Chinese domestic brand, because by using an English name, a Chinese brand can appear like an international one. TCL, a Chinese brand without a Chinese name, is a good example of such a mindset...

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...

 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...

There are many examples of brand names that based on their innovative qualities, superior design or outstanding performance in the market has become the reference and even the name of a whole group of products e.g. Kleenex, Jeep, Rollerblades, Vespa etc...