In today’s digital, always-on world, words are an increasingly powerful currency for brands to create real-time value and demonstrate relevance.

But finding the right words—and using them effectively—requires rigor and structure. Deploying a thoughtful verbal branding strategy (sometimes called a verbal identity) can help bridge your brand strategy to in-market execution through content, communications and experiences.

From finding the right voice, to building equity in key messages, to creating a methodical approach to portfolio naming, a clear verbal strategy can empower writers, marketers and sales teams with centralized ways to create cohesive, connected communications. Which, when done right, have the power to influence opinion, shift perceptions and ultimately help drive business growth.

Defining Your Verbal Branding Strategy

Strategic Naming

Simply put, names are one of the quickest ways for brands to tell their stories. A great name provides a glimpse into what a brand stands for and gives audiences a preview of the experience to come. And while good names can come from anywhere, the best ones are just as strategic as they are creative. Taking an art and science approach to naming ensures names not only signal a compelling story but also connect back to their strategy.

Before ideating names, it’s important to get strategically grounded by thinking through questions like:

• What should my new name communicate about my business or product?
• What should it signal for the future?
• How will my audiences interact with the name? And where?
• How can I avoid naming trends to create an enduring, evergreen name?
• How can my name help me stand out in my category?

And because naming is inherently an emotional, subjective process, it’s key to align on these questions at the outset with all relevant stakeholders and decision-makers and bring them along for what will surely be an iterative process.

Nomenclature

But while most organizations aren’t naming or re-naming their company or hero product every day, almost all organizations are tasked with managing product, service or feature naming.

This is particularly true in today’s world of mergers, acquisitions and rapid innovation, where portfolios across categories have become complex and inconsistent, ultimately creating a confusing customer experience.

Nomenclature, also known as Naming Systems or Naming Architecture, allows brands to create order and hierarchy across their portfolios to provide internal clarity around offerings and how they work together as a whole. This creates a more simplified way for customers to better navigate a brand’s breadth of offerings, ultimately driving choice.

At Prophet, we take a considered, strategic approach to nomenclature that ensures existing portfolio names are optimized and streamlined, while also providing clear systems and constructs for creating new names. This creates efficiencies in naming and managing names internally while providing a system for growing and evolving portfolio names in the future.

Brand Voice

Just like people, brands also have unique personalities, styles and quirks that define their behaviors and relationships. Brand voice is the art of conveying that personality through how its people write and speak.

By using a distinct voice consistently across touchpoints, brands are able to make connections, strengthen relationships and build loyalty and affinity over time. Brand voice can also help you stand out and grab attention in a crowded or commoditized category. But creating a voice isn’t just a creative exercise—it’s also a strategic one. To be truly successful, your voice should be rooted in your brand strategy and organizational DNA, optimized for your industry, and reflective of your customers’ needs and attitudes.

“A clear verbal strategy can empower writers, marketers and sales teams with centralized ways to create cohesive, connected communications.”

But while your voice is a hardworking asset, simplicity and utility are key to successful execution. We recommend avoiding “attribute soup” and boiling your voice down to just 2-3 core components. If you were tasked with writing, say, a piece that must be Trusted, Friendly, Insightful, Bold, and Engaging—would you know where to start? Instead, try to identify the main hallmarks of your voice, and distill them into a persona and 2-3 directive principles that give your writers a clearer understanding of what “right” sounds like.

Messaging

Now, onto messaging. First things first, messaging themes aren’t copy—they guide copy. As high-level communications points, they can be dialed up and down across communications and adapted for different audiences—ensuring a flexible, cohesive expression, rather than a static, repetitive one.

Because messaging should help convey your strategy, your positioning or value proposition should be your starting point for developing your messages. If you don’t have that in place, you can still derive messages by thinking about the intersection between what your brand wants to say, and what your audience wants to hear—leaving room for how you’ll grow and evolve in the near future.

By prioritizing those ideas down to a focused set, you can bolster them with proof points, keywords or phrases that help writers and marketers bring them to life.

It can be easy to see how voice and messaging come to life in high-impact touchpoints like advertising or your website, but it’s equally, if not more important, to use these tools in more functional touchpoints, like customer service call center scripts and chatbots, so that on-strategy voice and messaging becomes an integral part of the entire customer experience.

Finally, don’t forget employee touchpoints. A compelling approach to voice and messaging can go a long way towards shaping internal communications and experiences that keep employees feeling engaged, informed, and inspired to live the brand more fully.

---

“Better than a thousand tastes.” “Anything can be happy.” “Sparrow’s nest coffee.”

Are these phrases, taglines, slogans, or riddles? Actually, they’re none of the above, but rather, the translated Chinese names of three brands you probably know: Subway, Pepsi and Nestle, respectively.

Choosing a name can make or break any brand experience. And as organizations look to expand globally, considering how your name comes to life in new markets—what it means, how it’s pronounced, and what it evokes—is key to connecting with new audiences around the world.

Chinese Brand Names

The Chinese language is character based, and because each character has its own meaning, every brand name can be interpreted as the sum of its parts. What’s more, some characters can have the same pronunciation but a drastically different meaning. Characters that are positive or neutral on their own can become negative when combined. Which means an elegant English or coined name can, if you’re not careful, become impossible to pronounce, confusing or even offensive to native Chinese speakers.

This is why most organizations pair their global name with a Chinese name that replicates its pronunciation to help Chinese consumers say and understand it.

And while a luxury brand may see Chinese consumers fight through pronunciation challenges to use its global name as a sign of a premium product or experience, more middle market brands risk rejection by not adapting their name for this market.

Thinking about translating your brand name into Chinese can feel overwhelming and complicated. At Prophet, with offices in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and the thought leadership of Tom Doctoroff, Chief Cultural Insights Officer and one of the world’s foremost experts on Chinese consumer behavior, we understand the dynamics at play when bringing names to China.

5 Tips When Localizing Your Brand Name in China

We’ve pulled together five tips to help organizations create a successful name and demonstrate relevance to Chinese consumers.

1.  Set the Stage – Identify Your Primary Dialect

You probably know that the Chinese language is highly complex, and perhaps better defined as a group of related languages, rather than one universal language.

Used in mainland China and Taiwan, Mandarin is the official language of China and overall, spoken by the most people, while Cantonese is spoken in Hong Kong and the Guangdong province. And while Mandarin and Cantonese share a written system of characters, how a character is pronounced comes down to where in China you are, and what dialect you are using.

Keep in mind, these are just two of the most popular dialects, but there are seven traditionally classified dialect groups, and hundreds of subgroups. But global brands usually focus on connecting with the largest population of consumers, which typically means accommodating Mandarin speakers first. However, conducting linguistic disaster checks are critical to ensure that a perfectly innocent name in Mandarin doesn’t invite ridicule in Cantonese—or any other prevalent dialects in your target market.

You might be wondering—how do I engage with Mandarin or Cantonese without being able to read the language? For English speakers, we often see a Romanized version of Chinese using pinyin, which is the official way to spell and pronounce Chinese characters using the English alphabet. But these sounds can have radically different meanings depending on which characters are being used. Take, for example, ‘yōu’ – characters you can use for this pinyin include: 优 (excellent); 悠 (tradition); or 佑 (bless).

2. Consider Your Options – What Type of Name Does Your Brand Require?

With thousands of Chinese characters, many with multiple meanings, adapting your name for China is a tricky business. There are two main factors to consider here; the phonetic link to your global name (how much they sound alike), and your evocative link (how much the Chinese name conveys the story of the original name). Some brands prioritize one of the other, but many do both.

Strong Phonetic / Weak Evocative Link

A strong phonetic/weak evocative link replicates the sound of the English name using Chinese characters as closely as possible, without mimicking the literal meaning. Adidas, or 阿迪达斯 in Chinese characters, and Ādídásī in pinyin, is a strictly phonetic transliteration. This strategy makes sense for the sportswear company, since it’s a namesake brand (after founder Adolf Dassler), and carries significant equity. While the literal translation doesn’t have a meaningful definition, it is recognizable and consistent with the global brand.

Weak Phonetic / Strong Evocative Link

In some cases, phonetic similarity may not be as important to the brand. For example, Marriott, 万豪 or wàn háo, does not sound the same as its English name, but can be translated to “million” and “grand,” evoking a feeling of luxury and style that reflects its global brand equities.

Strong Phonetic / Strong Evocative Link

Many believe that a best-in-class name brings both a phonetic similarity and strong evocative meaning to bear. Coca-Cola is frequently brought up as the gold standard, and for good reason. Before standardizing their Chinese name, Coca-Cola was transliterated at the local level by shop owners in many ways, having a different literal meaning from one shop to the next (“bite the wax tadpole” is the most infamous). In 1928, Coca-Cola trademarked their official Chinese name, 可口可樂 or kě kǒu kě lè, which can be translated as “makes mouths happy” or sometimes “yummy” and “joy”. They now have a close aural approximation, and one that lends a positive association.

3. What Do You Want Your Name to Say About Your Brand?

While the English name of a brand lends international credibility, “Your Chinese name can be an opportunity to create thematic resonance,” Doctoroff says. “The need to elevate the proposition through the brand name is important both for memorability’s sake, but also to give a sense of what the role of the brand in the consumer’s life is.”

For this reason, many businesses choose to transliterate their names to be aspirational articulations of the brand’s higher purpose and its reason for being, rather than a direct translation of the goods or services. Transliterations often rely on images and metaphors, as well as benefit-oriented language, around benefits like “happiness” and “prosperity”.

For example, take the shampoo brand, Head & Shoulders, which becomes 海飞丝(hǎi fēi sī), translating to “flying silk of the sea.”

The exception? Those iconic brands who not only own a word, but an image. Apple is translated directly to 苹果, (píngguŏ). “Because of its iconic stature, the pervasive use of the apple in its visual iconography, and the fact that ‘apple’ is a real word name, it makes sense for it to be translated, rather than transliterated,” says Doctoroff.

4. Recognize that Your Name Can’t Communicate Everything

It may be tempting to load your Chinese name with many characters to augment your brand’s storytelling. It’s an issue we struggle with in English naming—why can’t my name convey everything about my business or offer? But just as they are in English, considerations like succinctness, memorability and ease of pronunciation are still key in Chinese. Consider the simplicity of BMW, 宝马 (bǎo mǎ), which literally means “precious horse”. It’s meaningful—
and not overly complicated.

As ever, a name is one part of your brand’s overall strategy. When LinkedIn officially entered China with a new Chinese name, 领英 (lǐng yīng), meaning “leadership” and “elite”, they focused on a series of localization moves through press releases, partner endorsements and China-specific offerings. This allowed them to communicate the name change, while activating their value proposition and demonstrating their commitment to the Chinese market.

5. Consider Your Own Brand

One name you may not have considered translating? Your own. While it is common for professionals that frequently conduct business in China to create phonetic adaptations of their names to help Chinese colleagues pronounce them, you can also take this opportunity to create a memorable name that communicates something about your personal brand.

Doctoroff, for example, is known exclusively in China as 唐锐涛 or Tang Rui Tao. The first character points to the Tang Dynasty, the second means ‘sharp’ and the third, ‘a big wave’. Through his name, Tom signals his respect for Chinese language and culture, and conveys his own value proposition to his colleagues and partners.

---

Companies that sell directly to other businesses have long debated the importance of a distinct brand strategy. And many still argue it’s a waste of money and effort: They say customers base their purchases on functional decisions like cost, quality and availability, not the emotional pull of brands. We couldn’t disagree more: With major forces like globalization and digital commerce upending markets, we’ve got a front-row seat to the many ways business-to-business (B2B) branding is more critical than ever.

How B2B Branding Differs from B2C

Of course, B2B markets are distinctly different from those that sell to consumers. The buying cycle is usually longer, the requirements are better defined, more people are involved and the stakes are typically higher. These are functional decisions: On the surface, there’s no comparison between American Airlines buying $12 billion worth of jets from Boeing, for example, to a kid shelling out 89 cents for a bag of Skittles.

But the truth is, there’s a difference between rational and functional buying. B2B transactions are typically heavily weighed and considered purchases. Functional requirements must be met. But there are higher-order elements in play as well. While attributes like competitive pricing, delivery and technical support drive sales, there’s much more to your customer’s decision.

“When you’re easier to do business with, your customers feel it. It makes their work more efficient and predictable. They are more confident and less anxious. They see you as a partner to their business and an ally in their struggles.”

Mike Fleming

These higher-order traits also drive buying decisions and are much harder for competitors to replicate. When you’re easier to do business with, your customers feel it. It makes their work more efficient and predictable. They are more confident and less anxious. They see you as a partner to their business and an ally in their struggles. When you bring your customers fresh insights and ideas, they feel that, too. They come to you more often not just to buy products, but to help solve problems.

This is precisely the power of brands. Instead of just relying on superstar account executives to carry this message one meeting at a time, the strongest B2B companies create brands that do it for them.

How to Build a Successful B2B Brand

Smart branding makes it easier for the marketing, sales, product and technology teams to do their real work: Develop and provide solutions that help customers grow. For this reason, we’ve outlined some of the most important considerations:

Use Brand Stories to Reinforce Business Strategies

Look closely at the fastest-growing B2B businesses, and you’ll see they are all propelled by a brand story that supports their business strategy. These brands, like Salesforce and XPO Logistics, have defined their business around the benefits they provide to customers, not the products and services they offer. They intentionally link brand and strategy in a way that makes it easier to move into–and even create–new categories. The brand is purpose-built for the company’s mission and also for the commercial opportunities they see coming.

Yes, B2B brands need a story. Your customers want to know what you believe, what you can do, and where you can go with them. For inspiration, spend a little time watching the masterful ways Getty Images is injecting its mission into new products, or Adobe’s award-winning story of creating lost masterpieces.

Remember Your Brand is Experience and Experience is Your Brand

Experiences, not messages, define brands. You can have the most compelling brand message in your category, but it doesn’t matter if the experience isn’t reinforcing it. For B2B businesses, it’s increasingly important to start with the experience your customers want as you define your brand.

The strongest B2B brands build highly relevant and hard-to-replicate experiences. From the first impressions they make in the relationship building and early evaluation phase, how they integrate with their customer’s business, the expertise and problem-solving they bring, it is all connected back to their brand.

Are the employees designing products, services and customer touchpoints all starting with a shared understanding of the brand, and what makes it relevant and distinct to customers? The strongest B2B brands have achieved their positions by ensuring that everyone understands the brand attributes and how those traits show up throughout the experience. Every interaction, at each step of the purchase process and beyond, makes it clear that they are not just vendors, but partners. Companies like American Express and MailChimp are succeeding because they take this partnership so seriously, creating steady streams of content and interaction that inspire and inform experiences.

Your Brand Goes Far Beyond Customers

While a strong brand identity helps B2B companies grow faster than generic competitors, it can also cement relationships and connections with other key audiences.

Employees and prospective employees also benefit from stronger brands. Increasingly, people care about the story of who they work for and expect a clear purpose and strategy. They want leadership to articulate that brand and create a team they believe in. Brands play such an essential part in making sure a company’s talent is engaged that many companies are now defining an “employer brand” that works in concert with the “customer brand,” treating it as two sides of the same coin. The businesses that use their brand as a storytelling vessel for current and prospective talent are winning the intensifying recruiting wars.

“The businesses that use their brand as a storytelling vessel for current and prospective talent are winning the intensifying recruiting wars.”

Mike Fleming

It’s no surprise that the largest and most competitive B2B companies, like IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, GE and UPS, continue to invest so carefully in branding campaigns: Their workforces are enormous and recruiting and retention are essential to maintaining their edge.

Wall Street is another critical audience, and well-defined B2B brands can give investors and analysts a view into the business that financial statements and forward-looking guidance alone cannot. How do you want analysts to value your business’ growth prospects? What peers do you want to use as benchmarks? Strong B2B brands have found out how to connect their story with investors in a way that is both credible and compelling. When UnitedHealth Group wanted to shift how investors viewed their business, from a carrier to full-scale health services, it changed the narrative.

---

Lost in Translation

In today’s economy, nothing matters more than a “customer first” mindset. But even the most customer-obsessed companies falter when they fail to translate their global purpose into localized efforts. Take, for example, Marks & Spencer, who announced earlier this year that they would halt online sales in China – just 2 years after also closing down their brick and mortar stores in the market – due to disappointing sales because they failed to adapt to the tastes of Chinese consumers.

The importance of localization seems so evident that it’s hard to explain why so many companies undervalue it. To some extent, the tendency to value globalization over localization stems from the historical emphasis brands have placed on centralization and consistency. But, while a certain degree of consistency is critical for all brands and does bring substantial business efficiencies, brands that tend to be most successful are those that manage to balance the desire for global standards with the need for local flexibility. Brands that are dynamic and ‘living’ versus static and confined.

It’s a strategy that is becoming increasingly important for global companies. “Localization of your brand proposition is ever more important in today’s digitalized world, where consumers expect to be able to cherry-pick and create their personalized value ecosystem,” says Akira Mitsumasu, VP of products, planning and services at Japan Airlines. “Having local knowledge and understanding of how to fit into that value ecosystem is essential to stay relevant.”

How localization fuels relevance

At Prophet, we have identified this obsessive focus on customers and their needs as one of the key pillars of building brand relevance and driving growth. Our research shows that the strongest brands around the world are those that manage to be relentlessly relevant. Everything these brands invest in, create and bring to market is designed to meet important needs in people’s lives. That’s what makes them indispensable.

When we look at companies that perform well on our Brand Relevance Index, including Nike, Amazon and Samsung, we can see how they use localization as a strategic opportunity for brands. Done right, it provides a potential lever for growth in an era of escalating disruption. It creates more relevance to more people in more markets.

“If you want to be customer-centric, you have to localize,” Li Run, Senior brand director at TCL, recently told us. “Only by understanding consumer needs and providing products and services that meet their local needs and values, can a brand achieve the deepest level of connection – getting beyond acceptance and towards being loved by local consumers.”

While localization is a strategic opportunity for brands everywhere, it is particularly critical in Asia. Growth here is expected to continue to drive the global economy for years to come. As multinationals seek growth in Asia’s diverse economies, localizing their brand and marketing is emerging as a core strategic component.

But it isn’t easy. “Very often when a company comes to Asia with growth plans, it first needs to develop an authentic narrative for the Chinese market,” says Charles Ferguson, Group Chief Commercial Officer at Tricor. “But the mindset and behavior of the Chinese can be very different.”

“Only by understanding consumer needs and providing products and services that meet their local needs and values, can a brand achieve the deepest level of connection – getting beyond acceptance and towards being loved by local consumers.”

Multinationals aren’t the only ones wrestling to find the best approach. More Asian brands are looking beyond their domestic markets for the next wave of growth, and localization will be vital if they are to replicate success at home in other regions.

This is a significant challenge in a part of the world where brand-building is still in its relative infancy. In the consumer electronics industry in China, for example, Oppo and Vivo have been successful with their strategy of investing colossal sums in celebrity endorsements and product placement. But that is unlikely to be sustainable as they expand into new markets. As a result, One Plus (in which Oppo is an investor) have taken a new approach for the Indian smartphone market, using guerilla retail and messaging around ‘the speed you need’ which resonates with Indian consumers desire for technical excellence. This has helped them capture share in the premium tier.

Unlock the power of localization

While localization has the potential to increase brand relevance and accelerate growth, the best approach will look different for every company and every market. Here are the four essential questions senior management and marketers need to ask:

Do I need to localize my brand?

Very often the culture, value system or competitive landscape mean that the benefits you want to stand for are not relevant or even have different meaning. For example, investment company T. Rowe Price uses the tagline “Invest with Confidence” around the world. But the meaning of confidence varies: In Japan, people feel confident when reassured everything is as it should be, while in Hong Kong, confidence comes from access to exclusive information. So how the company communicates and delivers on the same brand promise is tailored in these markets.

Who should I localize for?

In an ideal world, companies might localize certain aspects in all markets, but that’s often not practical. Prioritizing which specific markets, and which consumer segments within those markets, warrant a localized approach is vital. But, are you clear on who you are targeting in different regions? Do you fully understand the attitudinal differences across markets and the implications for your brand? Developing a robust fact-base about the consumer to identify any potential differences is critical.

Budweiser is one example of a global brand that has managed to use a similar brand positioning but targeting a different audience in a way that fits their lifestyle. Their target in China is younger and more premium, so they have devised fresh retail and digital activations tailored to this audience to draw them into the brand experience beyond the product itself.

To what extent do I localize?

There are so many elements that make up your brand strategy and marketing mix. It is hard for companies to know how much change is right. Should you alter your brand promise, product names and logos, the product itself, distribution channels, or simply modify the messaging or visuals? The key is to identify the levers that most impact relevance in the category and market.

At Marriott, for example, the brand’s foundations – its positioning, promise and values – “must be globally consistent,” says Mike Fulkerson, VP, brand and marketing, Asia Pacific. “Keeping those foundational elements is important to meeting the needs of consumers around the world. We are most focused on localizing how we communicate the brands as well as more specific elements of the guest experience, such as food and beverage.”

How can I deliver?

Finally, it’s important to be realistic about the capabilities you have both in-house and through your network of partners, to bring a localized strategy to life in an authentic way. “Having a management team that understands the value of both cultures is very important,” says John Kim, CEO at Burger King Japan. “Look for people with sensitivity, as well as personal depth and maturity, people who can listen and comprehend the ‘why’ behind what people are saying and to decode the underlying values.”

---