94% of Americans Cannot Name One Chinese Brand. Can you?

https://www.hdtradeservices.com/blog/Ninety+Four+Percent+of+American+Consumers+Cannot+Name+One+Chinese+Brand

by dsugarman • 13 years ago

28 56 13 years ago

minopret3• 13 years ago

Besides Lenovo? I had seen Alibaba.com come up in my searches for electronic knick knacks. It's impressively huge. Baidu Baike comes up in discussions of what could compare to Wikipedia, although I'll admit I wasn't able to spell it without searching for it. I'm aware that there are additional Chinese sites in the top 10 on Alexa, but I couldn't name them without looking.

So I imagine that, like me, a lot of Hacker News users can think of a couple of Chinese brands.

networked3• 13 years ago

Xiaomi should also be an obvious one to people who work with Android.

As for companies with more mainstream recognition, Foxconn, though it's for less than cheerful reasons.

Edit: although their largest factory [1] is in Shenzhen, China, Foxconn is actually a Taiwanese company.

[1] The (in)famous "Foxconn City" that makes most iStuff, employs over 200000 people and has its own TV station.

kbar13• 13 years ago

foxconn is from Taiwan...

kyllo• 13 years ago

Foxconn is a manufacturer, not a brand. They win contracts to manufacture products for other brands. You cannot buy a Foxconn-branded product, because they don't exist (yet).

joshAg• 13 years ago

including:

    Brand / Company    % of Respondents    Category

    Lenovo             2.53%               Consumer Electronics

loudmax2• 13 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if 94% of Americans didn't realize that Lenovo was a Chinese brand. Huawei and Haier sound Chinese; Lenovo doesn't. Our letter "v" isn't even a sound in Mandarin.

mpyne• 13 years ago

I actually thought Haier was a German-sounding brand, I didn't know it was Chinese.

JumpCrisscross• 13 years ago

Haier is a German name. It was picked, in part, to make the firm sound less Chinese.

unix-dude• 13 years ago

Pretty sad, considering quite a few popular smartphones are re-branded ZTE and Huawei phones.

dsugarman4• 13 years ago

You are very right. A lot of consumer products in general are developed by the manufacturers and they find brands that want to use them for 'OEM'. It is sad that they don't get the brand recognition or margins..

smooradian• 13 years ago

Cathay Pacific, Air China

rayiner• 13 years ago

Cathay is the shit.

johnward• 13 years ago

because other companies utilize china's manufacturer capabilities and market the products with their own brand

stuaxo• 13 years ago

I like how their link to "the four fatal mistakes of trade show blah" goes to a 404..

dsugarman4• 13 years ago

thanks for pointing this out. Fixed!

13b9f227ecf0• 13 years ago

Are Taiwanese companies Chinese or not?

loudmax2• 13 years ago

That is a controversial subject that the article doesn't even address. I think for the purpose of this discussion we can treat Taiwan as separate.

minopret3• 13 years ago

Taiwan includes Foxconn. I for one was not sufficiently inquisitive to learn that until now.

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

"Poor US Market Strategy and Execution" Is it really an example of a poor marketing?

If you are a chinese brand, do you win by positioning you as chinese? Really, do you? Do you want to be associated with walmart, chinese hackers and mao ze dung?

I think if you are a chinese brand, your best marketing strategy is to focus on quality and affordability of your wares, not on your chineseness.

baddox2• 13 years ago

Based on the list of top responses and "Chinese Brands To Look Out For," most are fairly unknown (or at least not prominent) brands in the USA. It's not that Americans are unaware that these brands are Chinese, it's that the brands themselves aren't exactly household names.

Lenovo is the one exception. I haven't heard of any of the other brands except for Baidu, and I presume I only know about that because I work in tech.

richardjordan2• 13 years ago

Right. I was thinking this same thing. It's an example of very solid branding.

At certain points in time some nations have some branding benefit because of a perceived cool-factor. In some fields some nations have a long-term perceived history of product quality. Mostly however if your product is perceived as being foreign you are placing yourself at a disadvantage in markets, like the US, where there's a high degree of casual xenophobia.

Your optimum strategy in those markets is to blur lines between brands and countries of origin such that people don't think of your product being from "other".

Walmart might be more accurately branded as China-Direct :-) ...but it would probably face slightly more resistance in certain parts of the US if that were so.

penny100• 13 years ago

What, because American don't buy products "Made in China" or "Made in Taiwan", now? They don't purchase Samsung or Sony products? You're claiming that Americans are "casually" racists with zero proof?

Please.

rikacomet2• 13 years ago

I'm surprised to see this on front page :(

I don't know a single Kiwi, Australian, Mexican, Brazilian brand. So what? Its not as if, 94% of Americans were interviewed :/

we have some serious war mongers here people!

miahi• 13 years ago

Never heard of Corona? It's a Mexican brand.

minopret3• 13 years ago

Good point. I heard of Tsingtao a long time ago, possibly before any other Chinese brand.

rikacomet2• 13 years ago

remarkably no! I'm not lying to just make my own point valid. I actually know a little about mexican language, culture, mafia, etc. But not a single brand.

Aloha• 13 years ago

Huawei, Lenovo, Wouxun.

bbuffone• 13 years ago

When you are not open about letting people into your market; it is not easy to get out of that market either. i have lived in china for 3 years so i would be cheating to answer this question.

In general, i find the chinese web applications to be a viable alternative to many non-chinese web apps (weibo.com, games...) my new favorite is wechat.com made by tencent.com. it is the best mobile communicator that has been developed.

Mahn• 13 years ago

Baidu, QQ, Tencent, Alibaba... I'm not American though :-)

I would argue this isn't a big deal. Sure, many Chinese companies would be very happy to have more brand awareness, but overall it's still working out very nicely for them.

ddinh• 13 years ago

I'm not sure these statistics are completely accurate. The study was done through Survata, which presents surveys as a free method to access paywalled content[1]. People who encounter such things have no incentive to be truthful or careful when filling it out, and might in fact just be clicking "next" to see the content.

The data does provide some information (e.g. visibility of Japanese vs. Chinese companies) but I'd take the 94% figure with a grain of salt.

[1] http://survata.com/home/how-it-works/

jff• 13 years ago

> 293 of 500 respondents (59%) were unable to name a Japanese brand.

> 37 of 500 respondents (7%) were able to name 5 Japanese brands.

I guarantee that most of those respondents have a Honda car, or a Panasonic TV, or a Sony Playstation, or a Yamaha motorcycle, whatever. I think this survey largely shows that people don't know where companies are based, because honestly, does it matter that much? The local Volkswagon dealer is right next to the Honda, Ford, and Jaguar dealers. If I go to the electronics store, I get Samsung or NEC televisions on the same shelf.

baddox2• 13 years ago

But look at the list of "Chinese Brands To Look Out For." These aren't exactly huge brands that Americans are aware of but simply don't know their country of origin. With the exception of Lenovo (and Baidu, since I work in tech), these are brands I've either never heard of, or that perhaps sound vaguely familiar.

patio11• 13 years ago

"59% of Americans couldn't identify Toyota as Japanese" would motivate a few professional peers of mine in Nagoya to break out the good whiskey and toast their success. Memories are long and they don't want to be the "yellow menace" (again) the next time the US economy tanks and Detroit wants covering fire from their congresscritters. (Though many folks locally would say that this strategy worked much better prior to the GM bailout, after which the US federal government suddenly remembered who was the home team and then accused the away team of, literally, murder, in a slanderous fashion.)

samstave• 13 years ago

Heh, it would have been funny had you said "...Mazda, Ford and Jaguar" dealers...

As Ford owns (owned) both Mazda and Jaguar!

mc32• 13 years ago

Yeah, I don't know what this survey even means if there is nothing else to compare this to. I.e how well do Egyptians or Russians or Japanese identify foreign brands? Are we on average above, below?

Also, I think the trend is for multinationals to appear more local, if so, this might indicate success on that part.

guiomie• 13 years ago

Dont click on the chinese characters on the website. I cant revert back to english now!

dsugarman4• 13 years ago

Strange error, now if you go to the Chinese version the English button is back!

ismiseted• 13 years ago

Apple?

jrockway• 13 years ago

Apple, Nike, ...

richardjordan2• 13 years ago

So the accuracy and value of this survey has already been questioned by many comments, and I concur with much of that so I won't rehash.

However I think the bigger question is that it has been a long term strategic mistake for Americans to believe it's the brand-name that matters most. Over time the name part of many brands has commanded less and less of the profit margin of a product. US branding has often become a thin veneer over foreign made product. Product quality has become the de facto brand of the underlying manufacturers. It's arrogant of us to assume that we have a monopoly on brand smarts and can therefore ignore the underlying production aspect of things. In the long run the production will command more and more of the pie, and the brand-name may remain American where there's some marginal value in giving up some profit margin for that, but often it won't as there'll be little value for the manufacturer there and they will go with their own branding - folks may not recognize Lenovo as Chinese in big numbers but that is no detriment to Lenovo.

I do worry when I hear statements that assume outsourcing cheap manufacturing jobs to China is fine because we keep the high value branding, design and innovation and top of the food chain stuff to ourselves, as though we have a long term monopoly on those skills absent manufacturing expertise. It's a dangerous and borderline racist assumption that increasingly puts US industry at risk.

mediascreen• 13 years ago

How about Volvo Cars, does that count? Sold to Chinese Geely in 2010.

dtwhitney• 13 years ago

I can't be the only one who immediately thought tsingtao?

catheryn• 13 years ago

AMC theaters is now a Chinese brand!

nhebb• 13 years ago

The point the article misses is that Chinese companies often make sub-components, or they manufacture goods that are sold under US and European brands. They also manufacture a lot of low end goods where the brand doesn't matter, e.g. the coffee cup I'm drinking out of.

> 37 of 500 respondents (7%) were able to name 5 Japanese brands.

I can only conclude that most of the respondents were idiots.

gregf• 13 years ago

That is easy, Made in China.

tbirdz• 13 years ago

Lemote

tokenadult• 13 years ago

From the article: "Using Survata, a web-based market research service"

Well, that's the problem that caused the crazy results that most comments here are mentioning. That's a voluntary response survey, which means that it almost surely doesn't represent the general population. (By the way, my first answer to a question like that would be "Huawei," but then I could think of plenty more, including brands that are only sold in China, which I have visited.)

Here's a FAQ about the junk data from voluntary response surveys: As I commented previously when we had a poll on the ages of HNers, the data can't be relied on to make such an inference. That's because the data are not from a random sample of the relevant population. One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation." Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this phrase.

-----Original Message----- From: Paul Velleman [SMTPfv2@cornell.edu] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM To: apstat-l@etc.bc.ca; Kim Robinson Cc: mmbalach@mtu.edu Subject: Re: qualtiative study

Sorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are worthless. One excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous example is the Literary Digest "poll". All you learn from voluntary response is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description" because they describe nothing but themselves.

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...

For more on the distinction between statistics and mathematics, see "Advice to Mathematics Teachers on Evaluating Introductory Statistics Textbooks"

http://statland.org/MyPapers/MAAFIXED.PDF

and "The Introductory Statistics Course: A Ptolemaic Curriculum?"

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb3k0nz

I think Professor Velleman promotes "Voluntary response data are worthless" as a slogan for the same reason an earlier generation of statisticians taught their students the slogan "correlation does not imply causation." That's because common human cognitive errors run strongly in one direction on each issue, so the slogan has to take the cognitive error head-on. Of course, a distinct pattern in voluntary responses tells us SOMETHING (maybe about what kind of people come forward to respond), just as a correlation tells us SOMETHING (maybe about a lurking variable correlated with both things we observe), but it doesn't tell us enough to warrant a firm conclusion about facts of the world. The Literary Digest poll

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5168/

http://www.math.uah.edu/stat/data/LiteraryDigest.pdf

is a spectacular historical example of a voluntary response poll with a HUGE sample size and high response rate that didn't give a correct picture of reality at all.

When I have brought up this issue before, some other HNers have replied that there are some statistical tools for correcting for response-bias effects, IF one can obtain a simple random sample of the population of interest and evaluate what kinds of people respond. But we can't do that here on HN.

Another reply I frequently see when I bring up this issue is that the public relies on voluntary response data all the time to make conclusions about reality. To that I refer careful readers to what Professor Velleman is quoted as saying above (the general public often believes statements that are baloney) and to what Google's director of research, Peter Norvig, says about research conducted with better data,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

that even good data (and Norvig would not generally characterize voluntary response data as good data) can lead to wrong conclusions if there isn't careful thinking behind a study design. Again, human beings have strong predilections to believe certain kinds of wrong data and wrong conclusions. We are not neutral evaluators of data and conclusions, but have predispositions (cognitive illusions) that lead to making mistakes without careful training and thought.

Another frequently seen reply is that sometimes a "convenience sample" (this is a common term among statisticians for a sample that can't be counted on to be a random sample) of a population offers just that, convenience, and should not be rejected on that basis alone. But the most thoughtful version of that frequent reply I have previously seen in online discussion did correctly point out that if we know from the get-go that the sample was not done statistically correctly, then even if we are confident (enough) that HN participants are young, we wouldn't want to extrapolate from that to conclude that the users of any technology site are young, or that users of the Internet as a whole are young.

On my part, I wildly guess that most HNers are younger than I am in part because this kind of poll recurs often on HN. Other preoccupations of younger rather than older people make up frequent topics on HN, and I've tried looking for signs that there are large hidden numbers of old participants here without finding many.

dsugarman4• 13 years ago

Thanks for your response. To account for this, we also asked the same question about Japanese companies. The results, as you can see, were very different and show clearly that there is low Chinese brand recognition in the US.

I invite you to ask your friends & family. Before running this survey we casually polled acquaintances. The results we found were lower than 1 in 20.

awenger• 13 years ago

Survata co-founder here. To clarify, Survata is not a voluntary response sample. Voluntary samples often have a bias because the individuals who choose to respond are those with strong feelings on a topic. For our surveys, the primary incentive is access to premium content - and not a desire to express one's opinion on a topic. We aim to have a respondent pool that truly represents the population.

rmc• 13 years ago

Y'know, it just occured to me that many democracies use voluntary responses, since they only count the votes from people who go out to vote.

rdl• 13 years ago

The only ones which immediately come to mind for me are: Lenovo, Huawei, COSCO, CNOOC, CNPC/PetroChina, ZTE, China Unicom, China Airlines (although I always get them confused with Air China, the Taiwanese version), Haier, pplive, Baidu, Weibo, BYD (due to Warren B).

There are a lot of Taiwanese and Hong Kong companies I associate strongly with China, though.

94% of Americans Cannot Name One Chinese Brand. Can you?

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