The game of naming luxury brands in China

Though Airbnb’s new Chinese name, Aibiying (爱彼迎), attempts to convey the brand’s philosophy to “welcome each other with love,” the majority of Chinese online users are not buying it.

In 2013, Italian luxury and high fashion brand Bottega Veneta had a similar experience when it changed its official Chinese name to Baodiejia (葆蝶家) from Baotijia (宝缇嘉) because it was already registered in the mainland. The pronunciation of the new name has negative connotations that mean “a steep drop in price.” Critics of the name say it does not match the brand’s high-end image, but instead sounds more like a name for cheap stores on Taobao. The public backlash prompted Bottega Veneta to stop featuring its Chinese name on its Chinese official website and other social media channels, including WeChat and Weibo.

The cases of Airbnb and Bottega Veneta show that something as simple as a name can make a huge difference in the way Chinese consumers perceive a brand.

“Finding a good Chinese name for luxury brands is even more difficult than that for FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods),” said Louis Houdart, founder and CEO of Creative Capital, a branding agency in China. “For luxury brands, it has to convey a sense of feeling or emotion, which is quite intangible.”

A legal game

If luxury brands know it can be a tricky task to find a good Chinese name that will be widely accepted by Chinese consumers, can they just not have one in China? According to experts, the answer is a clear no, unless brands are fearless of intellectual property infringement and low-quality knockoff goods sold by the entities that steal their names.

“From a legal perspective, having a Chinese name is necessary for luxury brands to do businesses in China,” said Vladimir Djurovic, CEO of Labbrand, a leading branding and naming consultancy in China. “And the bigger the brands’ Chinese market has become, the more important it is for them to have a Chinese name.”

What has caused a big headache for many international well-known brands is the strong interest by domestic organizations and individuals to register their Chinese names, either the transliteration, in pinyin, or in a highly close format. Luxury goods giants Louis Vuitton and Hermès both once got involved in such a legal dispute. A Chinese company took the Chinese characters “爱玛仕” in 1995, pronouncing as “Ai Ma Shi”, which is the same as Hermès’s official Chinese name “爱马仕”. The French luxury powerhouse fought the case starting in 1997, but did not succeed in winning after more than 10 years of appeals.

A proper way for a luxury brand to protect itself against such risks, thus, is to create an official Chinese name and register it as a trademark with the State Administration for Industry and Commerce.

Creativity is subjective

For luxury brands, finding a Chinese name that is widely accepted by different stakeholders has become increasingly complicated thanks to the fast pace of communication and the flow of information.