The Evaluation Of Bilingual Brand Names By Bilingual Consumers

Bilingual consumer markets include two key characteristics. First, consumers grow up with a native language (dominant language) and in addition learn to speak and read another language (non-dominant language). Second, through the media and other commercial channels, these bilingual consumers are exposed to bilingual stimuli that contain both the dominant and the non-dominant language. In Asia-Pacific region, Hong Kong and Singapore are typical bilingual (Chinese and English) consumer markets. Mainland China, which has a consumer population of 1.3 billion, is changing into bilingual consumer market. This paper tries to study how bilingual consumers in the China market evaluate bilingual brand names.Chapter One introduces the background, significance and conceptual framework of this study. It states that people with Chinese as native language rely mainly on visual representation, while people with English as mother tongue tend to rely on phonological representation.Chapter Two is literature review, which is divided into three parts. The first part expounds the close relationship between brand name and brand equity; the second part is a linguistic comparison of Chinese and English, stating that English is a phonetic language, whereas Chinese is a logographic language; the third part analyzes theories on the translation of brand names, which establishes the basis on which to explain the evaluation of bilingual brand names by bilingual consumers.Since the major concern of this paper is the evaluation of the localization of international brand names in China by Chinese bilingual consumers, as a reference framework, Chapter Three attempts to analyze the brand names of Chinese products from a linguistic angle.Chapter Four elaborates on the representation structure of mental lexicon of bilinguals and stresses the importance of proficiency of non-dominant language. It explains why this study chooses the proficiency of non-dominant language of bilingual consumers as the person-related characteristics on which to carry out research.Chapter Five and Six describes the experimental study on the role of language proficiency in evaluating bilingual brand names. 16 brand names (4 versions for 4 product categories) are created. The original names are inEnglish, with the Chinese translation related or not related to the English name in the two dimensions of sound and meaning. Questionnaire survey was conducted on 160 respondents (high English proficiency and low English proficiency) to obtain their evaluation of these brand names. Using SPSS.ll, we discover significant cross effect between language proficiency and the sound and meaning of brand names.The data obtained from the experiment reveals: Chinese-English speakers who are highly proficient in the non-dominant language (i.e., English) will access phonological and semantic representations of both the Chinese and English language and therefore rely on both sound and meaning relatedness (of the Chinese and English names) in evaluating brand names; while Chinese-English speakers who are less proficient in the non-dominant language (i.e., English) will access phonological and semantic representations of Chinese and rely more on meaning than sound relatedness in evaluating brand names;The innovation of this study are: first, it improves the consumer behavior model by adding the element of language into it, thus providing practical suggestions to marketers so that they can aim at the specific sub-cultural group in the market more effectively; second, the previous study of bilingual consumer environment used only the stimulus-related characteristics while this study takes into account both the person-related and stimulus-related characteristics.Tong-yu Gu (Enterprise Management) Supervised by Prof. Qing-liang Gu...