As a trademark lawyer who has worked for a lot of foreign brand owners in China, I usually like to tell horror stories of companies that failed to register their Chinese names, companies that failed to choose good Chinese names, and companies that are lazy and have let their distributors/licensees/the market choose their Chinese names. All wonderful stories, but here’s a chance for some balance.

I read a story yesterday about SAIC and their "Roewe"/?? car brand. It reminded me that I had the pleasure of listening to a presentation a few years ago from one of the folks who came up with the Roewe brand. It was actually rather fascinating – a lot of work and thought went into the decision on the logo art. While I appreciate all of that, and I do like the logo, I have a problem with the name "Roewe".

Any idea what is the correct pronunciation of the brand?

Not sure? Me too. The Telegraph called the pronunciation "tricky". That’s kind of a problem. Moreover, the brand has been around for a few years now, and I still don’t know the correct pronunciation.

As a Chinese brand, the English name is of secondary importance. However, if you’re going to use the English brand prominently (and they do), you gotta give it some thought, especially if you want to be a major exporter.

There is a backstory here. SAIC was originally going to purchase the "Rover" brand from BMW (they did get the technology). However, Ford squashed the branding by excercising an option they had to the name.

So this was supposed to be the "Rover." Kind of makes the name "Roewe" a bit derivative (not to mention possibly infringing), but that’s not my problem here.

By the way, I am assuming that we are talking about English here. It makes sense that the name is English, since the originally sought-after brand was English. On the other hand, "R-O-E-W-E" pronounced in German sounds almost exactly like "Rover," so you never know. Maybe the deal team, which included BMW, were all German speakers.

OK, back to my problem with the name. There are actually two problems. First, if you are going to come up with something in English, make sure that it is easy to pronounce in English. I realize that there are some ad execs out there who delight in coming up with weird brand names that are hard to pronounce on purpose, to generate some buzz. I don’t see that here. I think that the purpose here was to come up with something that looked/sounded like "Rover," and the project had an insufficient number of native speakers involved.

Always a huge mistake. I’ve had clients ask me what I thought of their Chinese brands, and I usually answer with "Who cares what I think? I’m not Chinese." I have a feeling SAIC, and their PR firm, failed to proceed with caution here.

Second problem. The actual (Chinese) brand is ??, which is a fine name, but unfortunately the pinyin is "rong wei". Some folks might find it amusing that a car has a name that sounds like the English words "wrong way." That doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence in the product.

The lesson here is quite simple. Do your homework and involve experts before making branding decisions. Why is that so difficult?