Interesting article in today’s NY Times Chinese companies building global brands by acquiring well-known, existing brands. Because they’ve been in the news, the article mentions the Lenovo acquisition of IBM’s laptop business, Haier’s bid for Maytag and the CNOOC bid for Unocal.

The reason for the global business shopping spree?

“Chinese companies are now facing serious [...]

We’re going to comment on this Knowledget@Wharton article a little later today, but the authors conclusions have some interesting implications for the medical device industry:
...the use of odd names seems to work best in products thta rely on the senses, such as food or fashion, and would probably not work in a high-stakes product category [...]

“I don’t think the name matters,” said David Melancon, CEO of FutureBrand USA, a New York branding consultancy.
“Consumers have shown us that you can slap a made up name like JetBlue and people love it because of the experience. We have lots of airline companies on our roster and one thing we learned is [...]

Here’s a summary of the brand names mentioned on Medgadget this week:
SIMpill – an SMS controlled pill dispenser
HyperQ – a stress test
Armstrong Medical’s EndoAssist and Pathfinder surgical robots
Royal Phillips IntelliVue Telemetry Systems patient surveillance systems
Biomedics’ NZ’s UltraSuction dentures. (We don’t make these up.)
Emfit’s electric film sensors
Andromed’s Androsonix biological sound sensor, a kind of stethoscope on [...]

Corporate name changes can be tricky. Especially, when a company buys another and the name being rolled out is completely new to the market.

In Panama City, I was lucky enough to witness Telefonica’s roll out of its Movistar service. While I have issues with the name (read on), I thought the rollout was brilliant.

About a [...]