jeanne boden

sleeping beauty 44

 

refuse ...

 

refuse ...

 

refuse ...

 

sleeping beauty 43

 

sleeping beauty 42

 

geely - 吉利

When I was in Xinjiang last winter, it occurred to me that many of the cars there had brands I had never heard of. In spite of the heavy snow and winter dirt I took some pictures. This Geely brand caught my attention because somehow - with the blue and white in the logo, and the white characters in the black circle at the top - it reminded me another logo.....

 

Geely not only developed a logo inspired by BMW, it also discovered another brand with a blue logo: VOLVO!

 

Geely bought Volvo. This event shook the West. All of a sudden I got all these telephone calls from the media asking what was happening and how suddenly China had become so strong. For the longest time I have seen it happening. It is not happening suddenly but going on for decades now. Many people in Europe never really wanted to know. Still today many do not want to know. But reality is there I am afraid.

And in good Chinese tradition Geely reflected on it's branding so it choose a fortunate name in Chinese: 吉利 means auspicious and advantages. What else do you need in life?

And if you ever decide to take over a Chinese company, remember why it is important to find a good Chinese translation of your company name, I explained that on a post on David's Blog here.

'classical' text in advertising

In this advertisement for bank cards we see how classical Chinese text is used in contemporary advertising, not so much at the level of the sentence, but at the level of the full text. The advertisement refers to classical China via the format of the text. Traditional Chinese texts were written from top to bottom and from right to left. 

no this is not china ...

It's London. (where I totally unexpectedly had a few of the most special days in my whole life)
 

and here is the english version!

As promised a few weeks ago: the English version of Mindmapping China.

More information on ChinaConduct.