Corporate Brand Mash-up DIY Rebellion

From the Wall Street Journal via Dark Visitor:

A property developer in Nanjing, hoping to lure business and buzz, set up storefront facades with logos such as “Haagon-Bozs,” “Pizza Huh,” “Bucksstar Coffee,” “KFG” and “McDnoald’s.” Images of what became known as “Shanzhai Street” spread rapidly online.

Once a term used to suggest something cheap or inferior, shanzhai now suggests to many a certain Chinese cleverness and ingenuity. Shanzhai culture “is from the grass roots and for the grass roots,” says Han Haoyue, a media critic in Beijing, who sees it as a means of self-expression. “It gives people another choice and the possibility of resisting dominant cultural values.”

I love that they are using the scrambled letter approach – wonder if they got the idea from silly forwarded email. This has expanded from brick and mortar space to websites that mash brands like google, yahoo, and baidu into one logo / search site.

Brilliant co-opting!

Applying some McLuhan reasoning, I wonder how this changes customers perception of Shanzhai products.

In single blind taste tests, people told they are having their favorite brand name product may fail to notice discrepancies, or notice them and shrug them off (I lack a source for this). When all appropriate visual clues are included – a Strabuks cup with logo, band, and top for example, could Maxwell House drip coffee be passed off as a new flavor?

Cleo McDowell: Look… me and the McDonald’s people got this little misunderstanding. See, they’re McDonald’s… I’m McDowell’s. They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs. They got the Big Mac, I got the Big Mick. We both got two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, but their buns have sesame seeds. My buns have no seeds.

Certainly.