Anytime I travel to non-English speaking countries, I’m always amused at how brands are translated into other cultures. The familiar Coke® logo becomes something very different when translated in to Chinese.

Big brands are still recognizable, and the fakes are sometimes not easy to spot. Imitation as a marketing strategy can get you into trouble. But when you are faking it in a country that doesn’t enforce international copyrights and trademarks, you can get away with murder.

With that, I give you a short gallery of Chinese branding:

Here are some familiar soft drinks with Chinese branding.

Here’s a marketing strategy: copy the competition. Imitation is the highest compliment after all.

Here is the real deal (and my favorite cookie).

A familiar detergent.

No new parent should leave home without these.

An odd brand name for toilet paper.

Pig tail kabob? OK, not a brand… but I couldn’t resist.

This restaurant serves knock-offs of McDonald’s® and KFC® products.

So there you go, the good, the odd, and the ugly of brands I’ve run across in China. Pig tails anyone?

I’m near the end of a two-week visit to China, where I have spent much time in rural, undeveloped areas. This is a country of stark contrasts. Bustling mega-cities teeming with activity stand beside semi-primitive villages with shacks and the occasional thatched roof. Yet the inhabitants of both these worlds have one thing in common… they all have a mobile phone.

Kunming, China

A village near the Myanmar border.

The inside courtyard of a village home.

Villagers, who wash dishes and clothes below an outdoor water tap, who share a community restroom, and often have a single exposed light bulb hanging in each of their rooms, have unanimously adopted the mobile phone. Villagers and urbanites alike text and talk frequently. In the city, I noticed more smartphones and fewer traditional devices than I saw in the villages.

Interestingly, I have successfully used my iPhone in remote valleys, and in villages thousands of feet up in the mountains. China, it seems, sports a coverage map domestic carriers only dream of. (I can’t get service on one segment of I-240 in Memphis.)

So what is the point of this missive? In China the 19th and 21st centuries co-exist, and even in far-flung villages the mobile phone has become an important part of everyday life.

With the surge of tablet device adoption, and all of us running around with our phones strapped to our heads, it seems that we are not only failing to pay attention to each other, but we really aren’t paying attention to the content on our myriad devices either.

This is where content developers – copy writers, designers, and photographers – really can save the day. If I’m standing in line at the airport browsing e-mail and clicking links, whatever you serve up to me better be fantastic, or I’m liable to be set adrift by the smell of Starbucks, annoyed by the screaming kid 5 people back, or just marveling that these big silver tubes can even get off the ground.

So it’s up to you, the content developers of the world: save us from distraction.

As Randy Jackson, John Strawn, or Pavlov would say, “Yo Dawg…” Although today, I don’t think Pavlov would have had to let his experiments with conditioned reflexes go to the dogs. He could simply observe humans and their smartphones.
Can you let your phone “ring” without answering? Can you hear the alert tone for new e-mail or text without having to look at it immediately? After wearing it on your hip or carrying it in your pocket do you feel phantom vibrations even when it’s not there? Do you suffer from separation anxiety when it isn’t close by? You are one of Pavlov’s “dawgs” aren’t you? I know I am.

While Jerry was shooting a few quick photos for me to use in a blog, he made a very astute observation. We had a box of 18 iPhones. It was buzzing, dinging, ringing, vibrating, playing music, and lighting up, and Jerry said, “It’s like they’re alive or something.” I think Jerry was onto something! 

The decision to have a smartphone is not one that anyone takes lightly these days. There’s lots of careful consideration, research, and planning that takes place before having one. You talk to your spouse, significant other, friends, other family members, and coworkers about what they have and how it has changed their lives for better or worse. You search the internet for objective information about all the pros and cons of having one. You may even have to look at financial planning, as there’re significant costs associated with having one. And these are just some of the things you do before you bring your new one home.

Once you get one, especially if it is your first, your life will never be the same. You are in awe of all this little miracle can do. It demands your attention by making sounds that you’re not quite sure what they mean at first, but with time you learn what each sound means. You have to protect this precious thing, so you get it a case and set up a password. Everyone wants to see it and know when and where you got it. You are cautious about who you let hold it, because you have seen firsthand how they have treated theirs. You’re not exactly sure how often you will have to feed it, but you soon develop a routine feeding pattern. You want it to be smart, so you teach it by entering data, downloading apps, setting up e-mail accounts. It can quickly become an obsession if you let it. Did it just make a sound? Did I miss it doing something cool? You miss it or start to worry if it is out of eyesight for too long or it stops making noises. You wonder if something is wrong. The first time you are totally separated from it is a traumatic experience. How could such a small thing bring such joy and pain?

I think it is easy to see how, with a few exceptions, this generic conversation could be about a puppy, kitten, or a child.

Yes, Jerry I think they are “alive.”

So what’s your smartphone’s name?

This week, StatCounter, a company that follows web traffic, announced that Bing passed Yahoo! for the first time in search. According to the release, "Bing reached 4.37% in February ahead of Yahoo! at 3.93%. Both trail far behind Google’s 89.94% of the global search engine market."

What’s interesting is that Bing and Yahoo! merged a while back to combat Google. Bing powers Yahoo! search results and both use Microsoft’s ad network, but they seem more like friendly competitors than partners. Are they really competing against Google or just each other? And do Yahoo!/Bing collectively have enough power to compete effectively against Google, or is this another Alta Vista (remember them?) in the making?

Ever since I got my iPhone last year, there’s been one thing that really bothered me. It wasn’t anything with the phone itself. It was something I noticed about accessories. Every device that had a built-in docking station required the iPhone to be au naturel (no protective case). This just didn’t make much sense to me. My logic was that most people spending $200-$300 on a phone would protect it by putting it in some kind of case, and I know that I don’t want to have to take my phone out of the case every time I dock it with an amplified speaker system. Just to make sure I looked at 18 iPhones from my colleagues at work and guess what? 18 iPhones out of 18 have some version of a protective case. Now I will say that I don’t think 100% of the iPhone-owning population has a case, but I’m sure the number is somewhere around 75% or higher.

So here is my question…why haven’t any of Apple’s innovative partners thought to design a 30-pin adaptor that can be included with their products? It seems like a no-brainer to have a commercially available product that might cost a dollar to manufacture and would exponentially increase the sales of $50 to $500 sound systems or other peripheral devices. I’ve Googled “iPhone 30pin extender” and “dock extender” with very few results that don’t end up on eBay, a foreign website, or involve a cable. I know there are cables out there, but if I wanted to see wires running from a dock to my iPhone, I could just use the headphone jack. Maybe I’m just too new to the iPhone. Maybe I just don’t know what I’m looking for, but from a brief search it looks like there aren’t as many sources for a simple adapter as I thought there would be.

With the adoption of smart phones, QR codes have begun to take off. Already huge in Japan where they were developed, these 2D codes are popping up in magazine ads, on billboards, shelf-talkers, and directly on products. Consumers can scan a code in a store and read ratings and reviews, get how-to info or an automatic coupon, and more.

That’s all well and good, but should we care about QR codes when we’re wearing our B2B marketing hats? Most definitely. These codes can be used to help bridge offline efforts–like a print ad–with online. A code can communicate messages that would otherwise overcomplicate and clutter, say, a postcard. We used one on our holiday card to send a special wish to clients and friends–you can see the video by scanning this code:

They key is to not let the QR code lead your campaign. Begin with considering the audience and the strategy. Is the audience technically savvy? Would they likely have smart phones and be willing to download an app to scan a code? Where will the code take them? Surely not to your site’s home page that’s not optimized for mobile. The content has to be worth the scan, it has to be executed specifically for mobile, and the audience has to fit the technology.

Comment and let me know about the good or not so good experiences you’ve had with QR codes.

As a mobile device owner, who do you think should “own” you? Meaning, in the complicated chain of content creators and technology owners that ultimately deliver content to your device, who controls that content and its availability to you?

My inbox has been buzzing with missives concerning both Google’s and Apple’s recent moves towards subscription-based services. Check out this article in today’s Mobile Marketer Daily email.

“Apple is testing whether they can sustain the ownership of a customer just because it makes the hardware and writes the operating system of the iPhone,” said David Schropfer, author of “The Smartphone Wallet” and partner at The Luciano Group.

Aside from making (a lot of) money, isn’t the bigger goal keeping those customers? Apple has nearly unsurpassed brand recognition, and they currently make some of the hottest products in the mobile arena. The iPhone at this moment is in that sweet spot where quality, content, and coolness all intersect. I think the subscription wars to own the customer will be successful not due to the legal maneuvers of a single adversary, but due to the clout of each player’s brand. After all, once you have a lot of customers… it’s easier to have a lot of customers.