While banks spend millions on creating an "image concept" around the globe, their efforts run into the ground in China.
Take Chase, which spends much time reminding everybody that it is not Chase Manhattan, and certainly not Chemical.
However, in China the bank has pragmatically chosen to use Manufacturers Hanover's name. The reason? Chemical's first merger victim has a Chinese name that translates as Civilization Bank. The connotations of "civilization" are strong, one China expert told Euromoney, and this name was too good to ditch.
Other banks have a similar problem. Their Chinese names have to sound roughly similar to their real names, but must also have "Chinese connotations". So ING Barings has the character "ing" then "bah" then "ing" again. The initial and last character don't mean anything, but the "bah" conveys a sense of power. Bah were ancient warlords.
Merrill Lynch's Chinese name translates as "Deep Forest" while Citibank's is "Flowerflag Bank" because when it arrived in China 100 years ago the onlookers associated the stars and stripes above its branch with a lovely flower.
Morgan Stanley translates as "Magic Flute", which leads to its top property analyst, Peter Churchouse, regularly getting caricatured in the Chinese press wearing a turban and playing a flute like the Pied Piper. The downside of most Chinese names is that they usually have a negative connotation too - in Morgan's case "Evil Sorcerer". To add to the confusion Morgan Stanley has another name in the Hong Kong press: Big Morgan. JP Morgan is "Little Morgan".
The most famous of the Chinese names is that of Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, which is known as Waayfoong, which means either "Source of Wealth", or "Abundance of Remittances". Its longtime rival Standard Chartered, which has the larger branch network in the People's Republic of China, has a less flattering name, "Squeezing and Hitting Bank".
But returning to Chase, there is one thing very Chinese about its new global image - its octagonal symbol. Chase staff proudly tell any Chinese delegation who do not already know that it is a Chinese symbol and was first used outside its Chinese branches earlier this century. Being a Daoist symbol it derives from the opposing school to that of Confucius, Daoism being described to Euromoney most succinctly as the poetry of "what will be, will be". Steven Irvine