Text: Sea Lion

Recently, McDonald's (China) changed its name to "Golden Arches", and Internet jokesters quickly started "complaining" mode. Various jokes quickly occupied important positions on many websites and continued to dominate the circle of friends. Along with laughter and ridicule, the connotation, appearance and development history of the brand have been wildly spread, creating a communication effect that many large-scale advertisements cannot match.

Some media speculated that this name change was a carefully prepared brand promotion activity.

According to Sea Lion's research, this name change does not look like a well-prepared plan in advance, and is probably just a "misunderstanding" caused by a pronunciation.

On this recent Sunday, my son said he wanted to eat a McDonald’s kid’s meal. As soon as you arrive in front of the McDonald's store, the big golden "M" shaped arch is the first thing that catches your eye. Sit down at your seat, open McDonald's official WeChat service account and prepare to order. The first thing that popped up on the service account was a notification: "McDonald's logo is the "Golden Arches"".

Under the big golden arch, I saw an article like this again. Suddenly I feel that the recent media and marketing circles believe that the name change to the "Golden Arches" is a well-planned marketing campaign, which is probably wrong.

I was sitting in the office reading jokes on the Internet a few days ago, and what I thought more about was the marketing concept and planning ideas behind this name change. And when you approach the Golden Arches and face Ronald McDonald's smiling face, you will naturally think: the Golden Arches are McDonald's, and McDonald's is the Golden Arches.

Opening this official push confirms my guess. The article mentioned, "In order for you to recognize McDonald's at a glance, the 'Golden Arches' logo is spread all over the world, ready to meet you at every corner." "The golden jumping double parabolas of Golden Arches have long become synonymous with McDonald's."

This statement couldn’t be clearer. This name change is to better retain McDonald’s genes and preserve the brand’s heritage to the greatest extent.

Of course, merchants rarely say that they are engaged in marketing in their copywriting. Based on this alone, it is difficult for us to accurately determine the original intention of using this name.

Therefore, it is necessary for us to try to explore the "true identity" of this name through several speculations about the name of McDonald's circulating in the media.

There is a theory that I call the "translation theory": McDonald's golden arches-shaped logo has a famous nickname in the West - Golden Arches, which translates to "golden arches".

There is another theory, which I call the "marketing theory": roughly speaking, in the late 1950s and 1960s, McDonald's listened to the advice of American psychologist Louis Cheskin. , using the golden arches as its logo. Cheskin said the golden arches were a marketing ploy to make customers think of a pair of nourishing breasts when they saw the logo — and then they got hungry.

The third theory, which I call the "cultural theory": According to research, Thomas Friedman proposed the "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention", which believes that any two people who have opened a McDonald's store Countries will not go to war with each other. As a symbol of successful cultural integration by multinational corporations, the Golden Arches are used to refer to McDonald's in academic works.

The fourth theory is what I call the "color seeking theory": Some people analyze that this name is for seeking out "experts", which means getting rich and "is in line with the taste of our country's middle-aged leaders."

Let’s take a closer look. The first three statements are actually discussing from different aspects: why the Golden Arches are McDonald’s, and the rich, historical, cultural, and marketing connotations that this logo may contain. .

The fourth statement is more like a joke. Although it is difficult to rule out this possibility, it does not appear that the management has any "attempt" to make this name popular throughout China as soon as it is released.

By querying the Enterprise Information Credit Disclosure System of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, we can see that this name change was completed as early as October 12. It has been more than 10 days since the media broke the news. The company’s official Weibo response will not be until the 25th, and the article “McDonald’s logo is the “golden arches”” was pushed on WeChat more than half a month later. It’s March 31st.

Based on these facts, we can roughly surmise that Golden Arches Company is not fully prepared for its sudden “popularity”. It is more like a cute "victim".

So how did such a name, which is natural, profound, full of heritage, and even somewhat serious, be "joked" by everyone and set off the Internet? How do netizens connect it with "local flavor", "Chinese time-honored brand", and "soil dregs"?

In order to clarify this issue, we need to read this sentence from McDonald's official WeChat account again, "The 'Golden Arches' logo is all over the world... The golden jumping double parabolas of Golden Arches have long become synonymous with McDonald's." .

Please note that there is a core detail in this statement: It is very likely that, in the view of McDonald's China's management team, "Golden Arches" is a noun. Specifically, the Golden Arches refer to the big golden "M" in each McDonald's store. No matter what the deep meaning of this big "M" is, the golden arches have a specific "physical object".

The reason why people find it fun and amusing is probably because they regard this noun as a phrase describing actions and states.

In traditional Chinese culture, there is a saying called the golden pig arch. On the surface, it means that a pig made of gold is arching the door of your home. You can make up your own mind about what a joyous scene this is.

Even if there is no golden pig, the door is full of gold, which reveals how eager the owner is to get rich. Thinking of these, it is inevitable that people will feel "very rustic" and "very rural".

However, can’t the decision-makers of Golden Arch Company see such a simple truth? Aren't they afraid of being misunderstood? Aren’t you afraid of damaging your brand image?

Controversial and ambiguous brand image communication is a taboo in brand planning. No one would dare to make such a joke with a company with such a large market capitalization. Even if you want to win lottery, you can't live with money.

In this case, how did this name finally get decided as the name of the new company?

When I was sitting in a McDonald's restaurant, I was chatting softly about the "Golden Arches". Suddenly I realized a small grammatical problem. And this seemingly inconspicuous grammatical problem is expected to reveal all the mysteries.

Readers who are reading this article, please pay attention. When you pronounce this sound when speaking to others, do you say "golden arches" or "golden arches"?

Maybe you are like me. When written on paper, it is "Golden Arches", and when read, it is "Golden Arches".

That’s right, the only difference in spoken expression is the addition of a humanized pronunciation. This erhuayin may be the real "driving force" behind this popular word.

Having said that, let’s give some extra lessons to friends who have not studied the “Modern Chinese Studies” course specifically! Look at the difference between having "son" and not having "son".

On page 35 of the first volume of the Ministry of Education’s “Twelfth Five-Year Plan” national planning textbook "General Introduction to Modern Chinese (Third Edition)" edited by Shao Jingmin, there is this statement about Erhuayin: "In Mandarin, Certain words often have the suffix 'er' in spoken language to express a certain semantic color or related function." Erhua has the function of distinguishing parts of speech and word meanings. The book gives examples, such as "gai" alone is a verb, and with the pronunciation of "er", "gai'er" becomes a noun. Here the pronunciation of 'er' changes the verb into a nominal form.

At this point, the fog gradually dissipated. A highly probable guess is that when the Golden Arch Company executives discussed this plan, they thought and said "Golden Arch Gate", and when registering for business registration, they habitually put the expression in writing and removed the words After hearing the sound, it became the current "Golden Arch".

This may be a bit confusing, but let’s put it simply: if you read it during discussions or chats, “Golden Arches” is a standard noun, referring to the big “Golden Arches” at McDonald’s. M"; and if you read it on a written medium such as a computer or mobile phone, "golden arches" is a verb phrase describing an action. The reason why it is full of joy and highly communicable is because it is an action rather than a simple physical reference.

From this perspective, if you heard about the name change while chatting with your neighbors instead of reading about it from an article online, you probably wouldn’t feel that happy at all.

Because, what you probably think of is just the big golden M that is everywhere in McDonald's stores.

It is very likely that a small human voice has made this a classic case in the marketing world.

You are welcome to leave a message to express your opinion.