“Brand” is a concept that only evolved as industrialization and modern businesses took off. It is purely created by marketers, with the intention to distinguish (and hopefully provide credit and guarantee for) certain products from other similar ones. Brands receive different views from different cultures. The following episodes that I ran into may be some examples of interest:
Episode 1: Not long after I arrived in the U.S., the flu season hit the city. In my office, sneezes could be heard every three minutes. One of my colleagues, after some crazy sneezing, asked me in a pathetic tone, “do you have any Kleenex?” I was confused. “Er….what is Kleenex?” She clearly did not expect such a response, but being a very friendly American, she patiently explained, “Kleenex is what you use to wipe your tears, maybe your mouth after eating. It’s usually white and soft, and it comes in a box like this,” while gesturing a roughly 2-by-1-by-1-foot sized box with her hands. At that moment I suddenly had an “a-ha” in my head, and I pulled out a packet of facial tissues (a Chinese brand, definitely not Kleenex) from my purse and asked, “would this work?” She happily accepted this “alternative” Kleenex. Episode 2: At a dinner party, my group of friends, both Chinese and American, got together to cook a hot pot, a fondue-like tableside pot where a variety of ingredients (meat, vegetables, fungi, noodles, tofu, seafood) may be added to simmer in flavored broth. I brought one of my favorite ingredients, 面筋球 (gluten balls), to share with others. One American friend, out of curiosity, was very insistent on knowing what these “gluten balls” are. He looked at the package, where little English could be found, other than the translation “big gluten balls” that corresponded to the product name. Not impressed with the translation, he asked whether there was anything in Chinese on that package that indicated its brand name, or a name that all Chinese would know it for. I was again confused, and looking him directly in the eye (with an expression of wonder and amusement I imagine), I said, “Big gluten balls. Most, if not all Chinese, would know what those are. I have never heard of a ‘brand’ of gluten balls.” He seemed resigned, but still picked on the lack of marketing effort from whichever company that made these generic gluten balls. What did these two episodes above reflect? I think they spoke to the differences of prevalence and acceptance of “brands” in different cultures. In American culture, it is very common for people to use brand names as product names. Sometimes the association is so strong that Americans may think of the brand name as interchangeable with the actual product name. For example, “Coca-cola” = carbonated sweetened beverage, “Kleenex” = facial tissue, “Band-Aid” = adhesive bandages, “Cheerios” = toasted grain cereal, and the list can be endless. This may largely be thanks to the successful marketing campaigns of these products, that the brand names have become so well-known that customers associate the image of the brand with the product in a reliable and long-lasting way. Obviously the companies making these products are quite pleased with the situation since this is how they take up market share and compete with companies with other similar products. The practice of creating a brand, publicizing the brand, and protecting the brand, with the hope of profiting from the brand, is well-integrated into the industrialized business world. Things do not look like this in other cultures. Chinese culture, for instance, a culture with its roots in agriculture, seems less enthusiastic about this “brand frenzy”. Since historically the majority of commodities in circulation in an agricultural society have been agricultural products, either raw ingredients (e.g. produce or meat or poultry) or lightly processed (e.g. roasted chicken, tofu, gluten balls), it can be challenging to market these agricultural products with a brand name given that 1) they are very familiar to the customers; 2) how exactly are you going to give it a brand name and make a point that “Lucky brand cabbage” is clearly different from “Fortune brand cabbage”? In traditional Chinese culture, agricultural products have been mostly viewed as “gifts from earth”, with little human intellectual investment involved. More importantly, it is very difficult to standardize the agricultural products—not all cabbages are going to look or even taste exactly the same, and not all the chickens, even if raised on the same farm, will weigh the same amount. The branded products have the brand as a guarantee, a promise to the customers that they will get exactly what they expect—otherwise the brand is not meaningful and will not have much value. People selling agricultural products usually cannot make such a guarantee, say all the “lucky brand cabbages” look exactly the same and taste exactly the same, and customers usually do not expect it either. As a consequence, it is very rare for Chinese people to associate any agricultural products with a “brand”. One property that Chinese people do care about when choosing different agricultural products, is the origin. In Chinese culture, pears from a certain region may be particularly appealing to the customers because the climate, soil and farming practice combination have historically produced distinctively sweet and juicy pears. In a sense, the origin of these pears acts like a “brand” that helps promoting them. I am not aware of any reputed origin of “big gluten balls”, but for tofu, certain regions near Shanghai have had the nickname “hometown of tofu” for thousands of years. Surprisingly, origin is not something that American customers typically pay much attention to (though the trend is increasing as more people want food from conscious farming practices). I suspect this may be due to the globalized supply chain of various products—even a can of tomato sauce could be sourced from several different farms, some of which may even be from other countries, with added salt from Utah, and finally bottled in Iowa. In the end, the company just wants the customers to remember the brand name (e.g. Heinz tomato sauce) without caring about where all the efforts of making this product come from.
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