94% of Americans Cannot Name One Chinese Brand. Can you?

> 37 of 500 respondents (7%) were able to name 5 Japanese brands.

I guarantee that most of those respondents have a Honda car, or a Panasonic TV, or a Sony Playstation, or a Yamaha motorcycle, whatever. I think this survey largely shows that people don't know where companies are based, because honestly, does it matter that much? The local Volkswagon dealer is right next to the Honda, Ford, and Jaguar dealers. If I go to the electronics store, I get Samsung or NEC televisions on the same shelf.

If you are a chinese brand, do you win by positioning you as chinese? Really, do you? Do you want to be associated with walmart, chinese hackers and mao ze dung?

I think if you are a chinese brand, your best marketing strategy is to focus on quality and affordability of your wares, not on your chineseness.

So I imagine that, like me, a lot of Hacker News users can think of a couple of Chinese brands.

The data does provide some information (e.g. visibility of Japanese vs. Chinese companies) but I'd take the 94% figure with a grain of salt.

[1]: http://survata.com/home/how-it-works/

However I think the bigger question is that it has been a long term strategic mistake for Americans to believe it's the brand-name that matters most. Over time the name part of many brands has commanded less and less of the profit margin of a product. US branding has often become a thin veneer over foreign made product. Product quality has become the de facto brand of the underlying manufacturers. It's arrogant of us to assume that we have a monopoly on brand smarts and can therefore ignore the underlying production aspect of things. In the long run the production will command more and more of the pie, and the brand-name may remain American where there's some marginal value in giving up some profit margin for that, but often it won't as there'll be little value for the manufacturer there and they will go with their own branding - folks may not recognize Lenovo as Chinese in big numbers but that is no detriment to Lenovo.

I do worry when I hear statements that assume outsourcing cheap manufacturing jobs to China is fine because we keep the high value branding, design and innovation and top of the food chain stuff to ourselves, as though we have a long term monopoly on those skills absent manufacturing expertise. It's a dangerous and borderline racist assumption that increasingly puts US industry at risk.

> 37 of 500 respondents (7%) were able to name 5 Japanese brands.

I can only conclude that most of the respondents were idiots.

I don't know a single Kiwi, Australian, Mexican, Brazilian brand. So what? Its not as if, 94% of Americans were interviewed :/

we have some serious war mongers here people!

In general, i find the chinese web applications to be a viable alternative to many non-chinese web apps (weibo.com, games...) my new favorite is wechat.com made by tencent.com. it is the best mobile communicator that has been developed.

There are a lot of Taiwanese and Hong Kong companies I associate strongly with China, though.

I would argue this isn't a big deal. Sure, many Chinese companies would be very happy to have more brand awareness, but overall it's still working out very nicely for them.

Well, that's the problem that caused the crazy results that most comments here are mentioning. That's a voluntary response survey, which means that it almost surely doesn't represent the general population. (By the way, my first answer to a question like that would be "Huawei," but then I could think of plenty more, including brands that are only sold in China, which I have visited.)

Here's a FAQ about the junk data from voluntary response surveys: As I commented previously when we had a poll on the ages of HNers, the data can't be relied on to make such an inference. That's because the data are not from a random sample of the relevant population. One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation." Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this phrase.

-----Original Message----- From: Paul Velleman [SMTPfv2@cornell.edu] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM To: apstat-l@etc.bc.ca; Kim Robinson Cc: mmbalach@mtu.edu Subject: Re: qualtiative study

Sorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are worthless. One excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous example is the Literary Digest "poll". All you learn from voluntary response is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description" because they describe nothing but themselves.

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...

For more on the distinction between statistics and mathematics, see "Advice to Mathematics Teachers on Evaluating Introductory Statistics Textbooks"

http://statland.org/MyPapers/MAAFIXED.PDF

and "The Introductory Statistics Course: A Ptolemaic Curriculum?"

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb3k0nz

I think Professor Velleman promotes "Voluntary response data are worthless" as a slogan for the same reason an earlier generation of statisticians taught their students the slogan "correlation does not imply causation." That's because common human cognitive errors run strongly in one direction on each issue, so the slogan has to take the cognitive error head-on. Of course, a distinct pattern in voluntary responses tells us SOMETHING (maybe about what kind of people come forward to respond), just as a correlation tells us SOMETHING (maybe about a lurking variable correlated with both things we observe), but it doesn't tell us enough to warrant a firm conclusion about facts of the world. The Literary Digest poll

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5168/

http://www.math.uah.edu/stat/data/LiteraryDigest.pdf

is a spectacular historical example of a voluntary response poll with a HUGE sample size and high response rate that didn't give a correct picture of reality at all.

When I have brought up this issue before, some other HNers have replied that there are some statistical tools for correcting for response-bias effects, IF one can obtain a simple random sample of the population of interest and evaluate what kinds of people respond. But we can't do that here on HN.

Another reply I frequently see when I bring up this issue is that the public relies on voluntary response data all the time to make conclusions about reality. To that I refer careful readers to what Professor Velleman is quoted as saying above (the general public often believes statements that are baloney) and to what Google's director of research, Peter Norvig, says about research conducted with better data,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

that even good data (and Norvig would not generally characterize voluntary response data as good data) can lead to wrong conclusions if there isn't careful thinking behind a study design. Again, human beings have strong predilections to believe certain kinds of wrong data and wrong conclusions. We are not neutral evaluators of data and conclusions, but have predispositions (cognitive illusions) that lead to making mistakes without careful training and thought.

Another frequently seen reply is that sometimes a "convenience sample" (this is a common term among statisticians for a sample that can't be counted on to be a random sample) of a population offers just that, convenience, and should not be rejected on that basis alone. But the most thoughtful version of that frequent reply I have previously seen in online discussion did correctly point out that if we know from the get-go that the sample was not done statistically correctly, then even if we are confident (enough) that HN participants are young, we wouldn't want to extrapolate from that to conclude that the users of any technology site are young, or that users of the Internet as a whole are young.

On my part, I wildly guess that most HNers are younger than I am in part because this kind of poll recurs often on HN. Other preoccupations of younger rather than older people make up frequent topics on HN, and I've tried looking for signs that there are large hidden numbers of old participants here without finding many.