The Impact of Brand Transposition Strategies and Firm Type on Consumer Ratings of Brand: An Analytical Study of Cosmetic Brands

Abstract Selecting an appropriate brand transposition strategy across different language systems is crucial to a brand’s success in the multi-cultural global marketplace. Drawing upon appraisal theory and using a large data set of 3,100 real cosmetic brands and their consumer ratings in China, we analyze the effectiveness of three common brand transposition strategies across three types of firms. The results show that the brand transposition strategies differ in their effects on consumer ratings of brand, and the effects depend on the firm type (foreign, joint venture, and domestic firms). Specifically, a semantic brand transposition strategy exerts positive effects on consumer ratings of foreign brands and joint venture brands but not of domestic brands. The phonetic transposition strategy and the phonosemantic transposition strategy benefit only foreign brands, and not joint venture brands or domestic brands. To better understand brand transposition between two language systems, we also provide descriptive analyses of the transposing patterns of Chinese character usage across firm types as well as the most frequently used Chinese characters in cosmetic brand names.