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Seriously why don’t these Chinese companies hire someone for 30mins to come up with a more reputable sounding name?
by granshaw 3y ago
Seriously why don’t these Chinese companies hire someone for 30mins to come up with a more reputable sounding name?
- justsomehnguy 3y agoBecause it works anyway and 99.9% of them don't even know there is a problem here.
- heywhatupboys 3y ago> don't even know there is a problem here. OR, they don't care.... American centrism on HN is so bad
- heywhatupboys 3y agoNot everything caters to the American sensibilities. Different cultures regard different things as professional.
- nortirn 3y agoIf you're selling on US Amazon it's probably in your best interest to cater to American sensibilities though.
- oooyay 3y agoIt's normal for companies to use different names to operate in different markets. There's some bidirectional setting of value through exclusivity that happens in some cases as well, like with Nismo. It's not exclusively an American concept.
- MenhirMike 3y agoMatsushita trading under the name Panasonic is probably the biggest example I can think of that most people would recognize.
- hakfoo 3y agoI always found it interesting that in other countries, they trade under "National"-- an even more perfectly English sounding word. I have a radio that I suspect originally game from the German market with a "National Panasonic" badge, because I guess they couldn't quite decide what brand to use.
- kspacewalk2 3y agoIf you want to successfully sell to Americans, catering to American sensibilities sounds like a no brainer.
- fatfingerd 3y agoFrom the article: > Small brands capitalized on the market’s transition from 2G to 3G/4G, benefitting from strong entry-tier demand, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
- heywhatupboys 3y agoand who says they want to? this is not a net plus game. Catering to Americans might mean catering less to other cultures.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mcphage 3y agoYeah, good point. Some cultures don't have... uh... names? Hmm.
- fragmede 3y agoFalsehoods Programmers Believe About Names * In particular, check out numbers 5, 20, 29, 32-36, and very specifically, number 40, should interest you. (See 24-27 if you take umbrage at the applicability of the previous set of rules.) * https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- Rebelgecko 3y agoWho are they catering to? 99% of these companies are reselling the same crap you see on Aliexpress, so I can't imagine they bother to use the same branding domestically
- makeitdouble 3y agoNot dealing with any trademark issue and other copyright stuff is probably worth the weirdness to them.
- mmanfrin 3y agoHas that ever really stopped them before though?
- makeitdouble 3y agoThey'd get banned on the spot from any western store. Imagine applying to Amazon US with a "General Electronics" brand of stoves. It wouldn't up them to decide if they get a listing or not on the site.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- solardev 3y agoIs it really that different from Nokia, Nintendo, Siemens, Lenovo, Asus, Samsung, Ikea, Ferrari, Volvo, etc.? None of those sound reputable by themselves, they had to build up a reputation. Hell, I'd probably buy a Zolimo Barbertron just FOR the name!
- vanchor3 3y agoMost of those are at least "real names" though, which you can find some sort of significance behind. Either named after a place or person, or with some sort of meaning. Rather than names that seem to be randomly generated 5-7 character vaguely pronounceable names that aren't already in use.
- solardev 3y agoMaybe if you look them up, but I bet the average person has no idea what Lenovo, Asus, Volvo, Nintendo, Samsung, and IKEA mean. Even more modern company names are kinda like that... Anker, DJI, Haier, Dalian Wanda, Kagi, Vercel, Nexon, Plex, Splunk, Zyxel, Sonos, Zynga, Hulu, Etsy, Yandex... Maybe if they just used a better random name generator with a better appreciation for English phonemes, we'd never know the difference lol.
- FormerBandmate 3y ago> Anker, DJI, Haier, Dalian Wanda These all started as the equivalent of Amazon brands and went legit after getting a reputation for relative quality. Anker especially
- solardev 3y agoNot Dalian Wanda, I don't think? They started in Chinese real estate and now own much of Hollywood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Group Edit: Actually, I don't think DJI and Haier were Amazon brands either. DJI was bootstrapped by a college kid's family after transitioning from selling electronic parts. Haier was in SE Asia before the US. Anker was though. Along with Aukey, RavPower, Mpow... some of those were eventually kicked off though, I think.
- unstatusthequo 3y agoOr just not put them in all caps all the time. I guess there is so little pushback from Amazon on this they don't even need to bother making names sound real.
- Racing0461 3y ago> Amazon sellers use strange brand names to make it easier to get a trademark. Amazon's Brand Registry requires sellers to have a registered trademark to list their products. The fastest way to get a trademark is to use a name that's unrelated to actual words I believe there was a youtube minidoc from the wendover productiont type channel on this.
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoIt's because in 2015, Amazon was opening up the marketplace to third-party vendors, but didn't want to take on the enormous job of quality control for those products. So they established the Amazon Brand Registry in an attempt to force the US Patent and Trademark Office to help them. They basically hoped that vendors would respond by going through the enormous effort to get a high-value trademark for something like a "Quality Appliances" brand, expending an enormous amount of discovery and legal fees (or just being a pre-existing well-known brand like KitchenAid[TM] or General Electric[TM]. That trademark would be so valuable that they would never risk importing lead-contaminated aluminum cookware and tarnishing their image, they'd implement strict quality control, fight back against counterfeiters using their likeness, and otherwise be a reliable vendor for Amazon. Right? Wrong. It's basically free and instant to file for a trademark for CHUKOFAZ[TM] kitchen products, because it's not a word or even a substring of a word that anyone would want to trademark. So the vendors did that, submitted their valid trademark for CHUKOFAZ[TM] to the Amazon Brand Registry, and imported the cheapest junk that they could build. And then consumers sorted by "price low to high" and a bought CHUKOFAZ mixer instead of KitchenAid, and raged at Amazon and the CPSC, because the CHUKOFAZ brand had ceased to exist, and the product page they'd bought from was now a HAKLBUC-brand backpack with 2500 5-star reviews praising how well it mixed cookie dough.
- foobarian 3y agoIt goes further, once the CHUKOFAZ pages fill up with poor reviews, no biggie, the brand is worthless anyway so just make a new one. Cue JUGGOKIT kitchen products.
- musicale 3y agoI ran across Amazon's KUNTLEY (also KUNTLY make you more safety) storefront when I was looking for Anbernic's pretty nice looking (and undoubtedly copyright-violating) game emulation handheld.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoSee also the NYTimes coverage of this: https://web.archive.org/web/20230203133645/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-copyright.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230203133645/https://www.nytim...