The Influence Of Chinese Brands’ Logo Graphic Design Characteristics On Japanese Consumers’ Brand Perception

China is known as the "world factory" for its low-cost labor, but in fact Chinese brands are becoming more and more competitive. Competing in foreign markets helps companies to innovate and improve, and selling branded products abroad can be more profitable than those of original-equipment manufacturer. Thus emerges the issue of moving away from the image as producers of cheap goods. In order to create and sustain brands in developed markets, Chinese companies still have a long way to go. At present, the number of Chinese companies investing in Japan is much smaller than that of Japanese ones investing in China. Except for Haier, lenovo, and some Taiwan computer brands, we can barely see mainland brands in Japan, let alone the fact that how less Japanese know about Chinese brands; meanwhile, there are a lot more Chinese companies that are willing to invest in Japanese market. As said by the sponsor of research agency TNS’s survey. Chinese brands don’t have many marketing specialists within the organization, and part of the reason why Japanese companies are successful in overseas markets is because they have strong international divisions. Without effective marketing strategies, it will be impossible for Chinese brands to merge into Japanese market. Advertising, which can be shown in the way of logo, is a key component of marketing strategy. With a glimpse of the logo, consumers have already got a rough impression on the brand even before they see the actual product. Henderson and Cote (1998) showed that design characteristics affect reactions to logos prior to any promotional activity being implemented, and they identify a set of subjectively measured logo design characteristics (i.e., a logos’naturalness, elaborateness, harmony, and roundness), as well as a set of objectively measured design characteristics (i.e., the number of parallel and repeated elements, and the logo’s proportions), and examined the impact of these logo design characteristics on consumer responses to the logo(affect, subjective familiarity, correct recognition, and false recognition).Drawing on literature about influence of logo graphic design on consumers, Japanese traditional culture, and Japanese graphic design, this thesis researches on the influence of Chinese brands’logo graphic design characteristics on Japanese consumers’perception of the brands, explores the moderating role of Japanese consumers’gender and birthplace, proposes a model and uses the data of 110 students from Hokkaido University to confirm it. Results suggest that positive affect is evoked by natural, elaborate, active, and round logos; subjective familiarity arises from lowly natural logos; color depth decreases color preference; under the circumstance of birthplace and age as control variables, Japanese consumers’gender plays moderating role in the relationships between naturalness and Japanese consumers’affect toward brands, elaborateness and subjective familiarity, color depth and color preference; under the circumstance of gender and age as control variables, Japanese consumers* birthplace plays moderating role in the relationships between elaborateness and Japanese consumers" affect toward brands, activeness and affect.