Chevy vs Chevrolet - much ado about nothing

Early this week, Chevrolet sales vice president Alan Batey and marketing vice president Jim Campbell sent a memo to employees asking that they talk about the brand as Chevrolet, not its shortened nickname Chevy. A similar message was then escalated across the world, telling overseas GM employees to immediately refrain from using the word Chevy. The logic behind it is that having a single consistent brand name is important for a global brand. GM also mentioned that model names will also be commonized globally from now on.

It's a classic example of how insular are the senior American managers at GM-Chevrolet. They still think that the rest of the world must learn to speak English. Depending on which period of data you look at, China is the No.1 market for Chevrolet branded passenger cars. And in the middle kingdom, very few people have heard of the name Chevrolet. But the logo has one of the highest automotive brand recognition - because Chinese in China know Chevrolet as 雪佛兰. I am not sure what do the Arabs call it as the middle East is also one of Chevrolet's largest overseas market. So if your largest / second largest market does not even use either Chevrolet or Chevy, why bother?

At the same week, I was hosting a guest from China. We came across a Chevrolet Captiva SUV, and he said "Hey it's a 雪佛兰". I said, "A what?" He then pointed at the Captiva, and said that this brand is very popular in China. I said, "Oh you mean a Chevy", and he replied, "A what?" It was quite amusing. I asked him why do the Chinese like Chevy, he looked at me like it's the most stupid question in the universe, and answered it's a very good car. Good quality, he said in Chinese accent English.

A Bumble Bee look a like gathering in China.
He added that in China, unlike here, Chinese consumers don't perceive Japanese cars to be really that much better than Germans or Koreans. The younger generation are more receptive to Japanese brands, while the older generation still harbour some anti-Japanese sentiments because of atrocities committed by WW2 Japanese soldiers in China. Japanese cars still sell relatively well there, but they don't have a significant control over the Chinese market like they do in other parts of the world. Chinese customers are relatively open to any foreign brand, as they are a young market and have less prejudice on the brands. Compared this to Americans who disdain domestic brands because of their bad experiences in the 1980s with GM.

People remember images better than words. Which is why a having a recognisable corporate logo is so important in branding. Words, due of different cultural context and local language phonetics, they may have different meanings, which is why car companies sometimes have different names in different markets for the same car. Toyota had to rename its MR-2 sports car into just Toyota MR, because when MR2 is read in French, em-er-deux, it sounds a lot like merde, which means sh i t in French. So I don't think it is realistic to have a "global name" that is suitable for use across all the many different markets.

The management of GM should really concentrate on other more important areas. You can't stop people from calling your brand in whatever way they want. And about the confusion / lack of a standardised global brand name - Coca-Cola is still the most valuable brand in the world, and Coca-Cola bosses don't have problem with their staffs referring to the brand as Coke. Like wise with McD / McDonalds / Mac. And speaking of Mac, Steve Jobs is not bothered about whether will people confuse his Macintosh products with a hamburger. People are not that stupid. Neither does Steve Jobs stop his employees from using the term Apple / Mac interchangeably.

Until today, most of the English speaking world still can't pronounce the Volkswagen name properly. It's fox-wah-gen and not Vox-weh-gen. But the managers at Wolfsburg are not bothered about it, and focused on getting people to recognise the logo instead. Like wise, for BMW - it's actually Bei-em-vee, in native German.