Seminar to discuss complexities of branding for China market

When Nike released a pair of special edition trainers for the China market, it had the character "fa" which means "prosperity" sewn on one side and "fu" meaning "fortune comes" on the other.

The trouble was, when read together, "fa" and "fu" translates to mean "getting fat".

Massey University China marketing expert Henry Chung says entering the Chinese market is complex that went beyond just "Google translate".

A seminar "Branding in China" on Thursday aims to address some of the perils, pitfalls and blunders of western and Kiwi companies in their attempts to reach the Chinese market.

"A lot of Kiwi firms just do a word translation and ignore the actual meaning of their brand translation," said Chung, an associate professor in marketing.

"This is not only ineffective, but very risky."

He cited AirBnB as an example, which was directly translated to Chinese as "love, compare and win".

"The firm was not very successful in their initial entry into China, and the translation lowered the quality of their brand," Chung said.

"It is crucial that Kiwi firms do their homework before entering the Chinese market.

"Just translating brands into Chinese often doesn't work."

Chung's advice for firms was to develop a brand and slogans that can be easily shared through social media.

He said most Chinese consumers often get their messages through social media and word of mouth.

"One way to do this is by utilising the key words technique on Wechat," Chung said.

With over a billion created accounts, 700 million active users and more than 70 million outside of China, the China-developed WeChat service is one of the largest standalone messaging apps.

Seminar speaker and organiser Will Zhang said one New Zealand bank used the image of a Chinese "death urn with joss sticks" in its poster to promote the dragon boat festival.

"Selecting images is also not straightforward if you don't have someone with the right cultural understanding," he said.

Zhang is the general manager of Multimarketing, an agency specialising in marketing to the Chinese-speaking market both here and in China.

The seminar will discuss fresh approaches of taking a brand to a culturally different market.

"For example, you cannot just directly translate 2degrees to Chinese and hope it works," he said.

"Because what that will just come across as saying New Zealand is a cold country."

Zhang said Chinese consumers had different values to Kiwis and were "more sensitive and obedient" to brands.

"They purchase things to represent their personal brands, they have trust issues and it takes a long time for the Chinese to accept a brand," he said.

It pays for companies to form an alliance with a well known brand, just as Beats headphones did with Apple.

Zhang said most New Zealand companies also wrongly assumed that all their China issues would be solved by simply employing Chinese staff.

"Not every Chinese is a marketer, so just because of have someone who speaks Chinese in the business does not make you 'China-ready'," he said.

"The Chinese market is made up of many small markets, each dramatically different and a message created for northern people might not resonate with the south."