“Unis Group of Tsinghua University”, “Peking University Founder Group”, “Shanghai Jiaoda Onlly”...Firms who are branded under the names of top universities in China are going to be soon busy. In fact, according to a newly released decree by the Ministry of Education, all the companies named after domestic universities have to change their brand names by the end of 2009. Exceptions to this rule have been made only for selected few high-tech development parks and publishing houses.

Other brands under scrutiny, however, are showing a certain reluctance to change their brand names. Universities such as Tsinghua, Beijng, and Jiaotong have a long heritage and are highly regarded domestically. Their brand names come with strong equity, as these institutions represent the technological and cultural centers of the nation. Such prestigious associations have brought, quite naturally, tremendous benefits to the sound-alike companies. They have become widely-known and highly-trusted among consumers under the “borrowed” identity, and have strongly invested into promoting their brand names. Changing them now will certainly translate in a big loss. “Change these brand names is going to be no easy task, especially for listed companies,” said an officer from Jiaotong University who is concerned about the situation, “it will harm the interests of stockholders.”

Even though, The Ministry of Education has his reasons to require so. When these firms were founded two decades ago, they were sideline projects of the aforementioned universities which owned all the rights on their trademark and properties. It is not surprising that they were named after their parent universities. But as the market changed, most of these firms were gradually listed. Nowadays, should the Ministry allow incriminates brands to keep their names, consumers will be likely to keep associating them with state owned universities, which could eventually undermine universities’ reputation of independent academic institutions.

Even worse, apparently “innocent” lookalike names have given birth to plenty of new homonyms. Only under the “Jiaoda” name, there are more than 100 trademarks registered. Although universities names have been more recently registered as trademark, the confusion caused by all these copycats risk to confuse and deceive consumers. Clarifying things up is necessary not only to protect the brand equity accumulated by the universities but also to distinguish the real identities among the “copycat” firms. Source: xsnet.cn