More than just a soft drink

• Source: The Global Times
• [20:12 May 06 2009]
• Comments

Coca-Cola’s economic interests in China are very real. The firm opened its first bottling factories in Shanghai and Tianjin in 1927, seven years before it opened in the UK.

Its first major stumbling block was its name.

The closest transliteration of Coca-Cola was Kedoukenla, which translates as “tadpole nibbles at wax.” It was not exactly the image the marketing men were looking for.

Soon after, the company launched a contest, with a prize of 340 pounds ($500), to find an alternative name for the drink, It was won by an arts professor named Jiang Li from Shanghai who suggested the far more saleable Kekoukele, which translates as “delicious and happy.”

The name change worked and sales soared. By 1948, the company was selling more than 1 million boxes a year in Shanghai, the first city outside the US to achieve such figures.

“Changing the name to Kekoukele was one of the best translations in branding history,” Guo Zhanbin, director of the Brand Culture Develop Research Center at the China Culture Administration Society, told the Global Times.

The world’s top companies sell concepts not goods, and Coke planted a powerful image in people’s minds, he said.

“The company is a master at branding. It made China’s young people feel as if they were falling behind if they didn’t drink Coke,” he said.
“That strategy still works, but Chinese people have changed,” Deng Xiquan from the China Youth and Children’s Research Association said.

“They have become more confident and most of them no longer blindly admire foreign brands.”

“It’s like stamp collecting used to be,” Yao Jian, a 28-year collector of old Coke memorabilia from Beijing, said.

“These days, collecting something like Coke cans is more fashionable to young people.”

Yai said his passion for collecting swapped from stamps to Coke products in 2002, when he saw a man selling items at a street market.
“I know there is nothing good about drinking soda,” he said.

“I’m just interested in the design of the cans and bottles.”