| Naming in Chinese, the Coca-Cola Story | |
The trademark of a company is its life. The Coca-Cola company has great success in China, which has become China's
leading soft drink company and one of the
top ten U.S. companies in China. The Chinese trademark of Coca-cola is an important factor for the success.
The Coca-Cola company did a great job in
seeking the best Chinese trademark. The approach for the naming is to search the nearest phonetic equivalent. To achieve this, it will need a separate Chinese character for each of the four syllables, Coca-Cola. The closet meaningful match found was Ke Kou Ke Le, which is shown in Chinese characters below.
Each Chinese character has meanings:
When they are combined, the formed word usually has more defined meanings:
So the Chinese trademark may mean tasty soft drink or to be happy with tasty.
Pepsico
followed the trend. Pepsi-Cola was translated into Bai Shi Ke Le. See the Chinese characters below.
So the Chinese trademark for Pepsi-Cola may mean everything laughable or to be happy with everything.
I think it is also a very good trademark.
Here are a few interesting
commercial sayings related to this topic, though the right spelling of the Chinese trademark for Coca-Cola is Kekou-Kele, not Kokou-Kole.
There is even a
Chinese recipe with Coca-Cola.
Need some background information, check out
Coke Meets China and
Coca Cola (China), Inc.
This trademark is unique for the balance of the two parts, kekou and kele. Kekou is related to food itself, a very common usage, and nothing negative about it. Kele is a little unusual, odd or a little something different for Chinese. An 'odd' name may attract people's curiosity and it is particularly true for Chinese since they had closed their door for so long. They want to try something new, even though they used to drink hot tea.
(Ke) = Approve, may, can, be able.
(Kou) = Mouth, hole, entrance. It looks like a mouth, right?
(Le) = Happy, joyful, be glad to, enjoy, laugh.
(Kekou) = tasty, good to eat, palatable.
(Kele) = be happy. This is a hard one since we don't use the two characters together this way. Fortunately the first pair (Kekou) is a common Chinese usage and there is also a 'Ke' in it, so there is a parallel. Today kele has already become the Chinese synonym for soft drink.
(Bai) = hundred, numerous.
(Shi) = thing, matter, affair, trouble, etc.