Google may be the most recognized new 21st century brand in the West. But in China, its name was a dog. Surfers had been pronouncing the unfamiliar “Google” as “gougou” or “gugou,” among other variants – meaning “doggy” and “old hound.” An easier-to-pronounce name is just one of the reasons why rival Baidu has been eating Google’s lunch in China. That’s why the company tweaked its iconic name yesterday as it opened a new engineering center in Beijing. Google renamed itself “Gu Ge” (pronounced “goo-guh”), which China Daily elaborately translates as “song of the harvest of grain.” Google (Research) officials said the new name projected “the sense of a fruitful and productive search experience, in a poetic Chinese way.”
What a dim sum of thinking this is. Let them pronounce Google any way they want. Americans find it difficult to properly pronounce high-end names like Audi and Porsche, so each name has an Americanized pronunciation, no biggy.
And the “old dog” as a negative is a glaring red herring. Yahoo means “idiot” in English, Crossfire implies “violent death” and Gap means “missing, broken or incomplete”. The idea that consumers process names literally is false. They process them in the context of the experience and the brand.
And give the Chinese some credit, they know that Google is not a Chinese word with Chinese meanings! Wang Laboratories, one of the iconic pioneers of computing, was founded by Dr. An Wang in Lowell, Massachusetts. Certainly they could have changed their name to accommodate Americans that might be put off by a name like Wang. But there was no need. Everyone understood that Wang was a Chinese last name and was not being used in the sense of Johnson, an American last name. Even though Wang was an American company. The same holds true here.
The notion of splintering a brand name like Google into different names for different countries, based on the sophomoric understanding of naming demonstrated by their explanation, is truly absurd.
There are no new rules of naming.
 | Says Blandor the Imponderable: “‘Gu Ge’… which translates as ‘song of the harvest of grain…the sense of a fruitful and productive search experience, in a poetic Chinese way’, is MY SHCTICK!!! This is no lesser a transgression than if Gallagher were to wear Robin’s rainbow suspenders or if Mr. Williams were to smash swollen cucurbitaceae on stage! I demand redress!” |
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