Brand Name Types and Consumer Demand: Evidence from China’s Automobile Market

Brand naming challenges are more complex in logographic languages (e.g., Chinese), compared with phonographic languages (e.g., English) because the former languages feature looser correspondence between sound and meaning. With these two dimensions of sound and meaning, the authors propose a four-way categorization of brand name types for logographic languages: alphanumeric, phonetic, phonosemantic, or semantic. Using automobile sales data from...