Live from Beijing!

In the US, naming a website is a hassle, but it’s pretty straightforward.  By “hassle” I mean that you need to check whether the URL you want is still available, and if not how much it will cost to buy it from the person who is inevitably squatting on it.  Because of this, you typically spend hours trying to find the “best” URL.  Of course, the name of the company is simply an extension of the URL: Amazon.com, eBay.com, yahoo.com, etc.

This process also happens in China, but it’s actually subordinate to something that’s more important: choosing the “name” of the website.  As an American, I found this hard to understand at first.  “What do you mean you have to find a ‘name’?”, I would ask.  “Isn’t that always the same as the URL?”

As it turns out, in China the answer is no.  In fact, most websites in China have a URL that has nothing to do with the name of the website.  Let me give you a personal example.  When I first started Blue Bamboo, one of the original ideas was to create a Consumer Reports -like website focused on home renovation.  Fortunately, one of the first URLs I looked up was available: www.ChinaDeco.com.  I thought this was a great name, since everyone in China knew how to spell “China”, and Deco was short and easy to remember.  I also figured that the upscale Chinese consumers we were targeting would like to type in “DECO”, because it looked kind of trendy.  As for the “name” of the website, I didn’t give it another thought, since the answer was patently obvious: we would call it “China Deco.”

However, once I assembled the team and asked them what we needed to do to improve, I was surprised to find out that the “deciding on the name of the website” was in their top three urgent things to fix.  I thought that perhaps the issue was that the name was kind of long, or that nobody knew what the word “Deco” meant.  But that wasn’t the case at all.  Instead, from their point of view, the site simply lacked a name — a name in Chinese.

The obvious translations of “Chinadeco” were not available. Companies in China can register the name of a website, and this sort of registration is consistently enforced.  In addition, in China you’re not allowed to name something “China” without explicit government approval, since using that word in Chinese connotes some sort of national (read politically sanctioned) online service.

After conversations that seemed to go around in circles for days, our top marketing guy came into the office one day with a simple three character name.  In Chinese: 装聪明 (Romanized it’s spelled zhuang-cong-ming).  As soon as they saw the name, everyone on the team said “wow!  That’s a great name.”  I knew what the three characters meant together, and understood that translated literally it would mean something like “Deco-smart”.  As it turns out, however, there were all sorts of other subterranean meanings to the three characters put together.  Principal among them was the fact that the first character sounds like another character that means “is not.”  So another way to read the name was that the website was about people who were not smart about decorating.  Instead of coming across as pejorative, however, the name would be perceived by our younger, net savvy audience as a very clever play on words.

After we agreed to use this new name, I mentioned that we obviously need to change the URL, since the URL I had chosen was quite different than the name.  My suggestion was met with puzzlement.  “But why do we need to change the URL?  The URL has nothing to do with the name!”  Suffice it to say that this was one of the more fascinating conversations of the week for me. 

The team explained that in China, most people can never remember the URL of a website, unless it is extremely simple and short.  Otherwise, they typically go to the Baidu search engine, type in the Chinese name, and then click on the first result, which is typically the website they are looking for.  This isn’t as strange as it may sound, since people who don’t speak English natively shouldn’t be expected to be able to spell complicated URLs from memory.  Perhaps more importantly, I’ve noticed time and again that it’s much easier for Chinese people to remember the Chinese name of a website than it is for them to remember the English URL.  Once again, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

As a result of this approach, there are many Chinese websites whose URL has nothing to do with their name in Chinese.  Of course, there are some high-profile exceptions such as Sina.com, which is spelled in a way very similar to the way it sounds in Chinese, or Dangdang.com, which also sounds quite similar.  But there are far more examples of the opposite:

• 163.com (in English called Netease)
• 51job.com (in Chinese it’s 前程无忧, which translated means “guaranteed bright future”)
• QQ.com (in English called Tencent and in Chinese called “tongxun”).

It turns out that the team was exactly right about the Chinese name, and the URL.  Once we started using the new Chinese name, everyone loved it.  No joke: almost every meeting with a journalist or potential Chinese partner would start with a 5-minute conversation about how cool the website’s name was.  To this day people who can’t remember that the company is called “Blue Bamboo” will still ask me, “So how’s zhuang-cong-ming” doing? Noone could remember the URL, but it didn’t seem to remember.  Once they visited the site and decided they liked it, they would add it to their bookmarks, which list sites by their Chinese name, not by their URL.

The bottom line: if you’re planning to set up a website to appeal to Chinese consumers, don’t assume that the URL and the “name” of the website are the same.  I’d suggest first focusing on the Chinese name of the website, and then picking a URL that is somehow related to the Chinese name, or failing that, a URL that is short and simple to remember.  Also, don’t be afraid to use URLs that are based on numbers.  This approach is quite popular.