Wine labels aren't (always) Chinese!

China remains one of the most promising markets for the wine industry. According to a recent study, China is expected to be the world's second largest consumer market by 2021.

Franck Celhay, Montpellier Business School - UGEI and Josselin Masson, University of Montpellier

Some signs remain intelligible, whatever the local culture. XiXinXing / Adobestock

The main exporting countries need to understand this clientele if they are to succeed. In particular, they need to think about creating label designs that speak for themselves.

Indeed, it's generally accepted that the graphic choices made in packaging design help to communicate values, a promise or even a brand storytelling to consumers. However, the question remains: how is this visual language understood when packaging is exported to a culturally different country, such as China?

Intelligible signs across cultures

To answer this question, we conducted research exploring the interpretation of 8 wine label designs by Chinese consumers. These 8 labels, created by a French graphic designer, aim to communicate 8 brand storytellings frequently observed in mainland China: "festive" wine (bottle 1); "romantic" (bottle 2), "ancestral" (bottle 3); "liberating" (bottle 4); "natural" (bottle 5); "peasant" (bottle 6); "poetic" (bottle 7); and finally, "château" wine (bottle 8).

Figure 1: wine bottles tested.

Two empirical studies were then carried out with Chinese consumers to test the perception of bottles of wine on a free word association task. The first study was carried out with a sample of 1391 consumers of imported wines with labels mentioning the origin "Bordeaux". The second study was carried out on a sample of 795 respondents including non-wine consumers, with labels in which the origin of the wine was masked (see figure 2).

Figure 2: example of retouching to render the wine's origin anonymous.

For each study, respondents were asked to rate 4 bottles presented at random. A total of 5564 and 3180 Mandarin responses were collected for the 2 studies. Responses were translated from Mandarin into English and analyzed using Sphinx quali software (see figure 3).

Figure 3: Correspondence analysis.

The map shown in figure 3 reads as follows: the position of the different bottles is indicated by triangles and annotated B1 to B8. The words on the map indicate the different associations of ideas generated by the different bottles. When the bottles are far apart on the map, this means they generate different idea associations and are well differentiated (e.g. B4 associated with the theme "escape" or B2 associated with the theme "romance"), when the bottles are close together on the map, this means they share a number of idea associations and communicate similar brand images (e.g. B3, B6 and B8 are associated with the themes "tradition" and "age").

Motivating signs

The results reveal that, for 7 of the 8 bottles tested, Chinese respondents were able to understand the French designer's communicative intent, even among people unfamiliar with both wine and Western culture.

The explanation lies in the fact that the 7 "understood" bottles use "motivated" signs, while the "not understood" bottle uses "arbitrary" signs. A motivated sign is one whose meaning is based on a certain logic. It is therefore possible to guess its meaning without having first learned what it means. Such signs can remain intelligible across cultures. Conversely, an arbitrary sign is the result of a cultural convention and is not based on any form of logic. It is therefore impossible to guess its meaning for a person from another culture.

For example, bottle 3 ("ancestral" wine) is spontaneously associated with themes such as "age" and "tradition" (figure 3). This bottle uses yellowed paper for its label. This is a case of a motivated sign, as the paper turns yellow over time. The association between "yellowed paper" and the notion of "age" is therefore based on a form of logic that remains intelligible to any culture that has mastered paper production.

Conversely, to communicate the idea of a "poetic" wine (bottle 7), the designer chose to reproduce a poem on the label in a fast scripte font that could evoke an artist's penmanship. From the point of view of Chinese respondents, neither the reproduction of the poem nor the typeface can be considered cases of motivated signs. With the exception of those who have learned French, Chinese consumers cannot read the content of the label and therefore understand the poetic nature of the reproduced text. Nor can they understand the meanings associated with the different styles of Latin fonts, since they use a different writing system.

Localized" packaging called into question

These results are interesting because they call into question: ( 1 ) the idea that visual signs necessarily have different meanings from one culture to another, and (2) the induced recommendation that it is essential to "localize" packaging, i.e. adapt its design to the different cultures to which it will be exported.

This idea is generally based on the famous example of white having positive meanings in Western countries (such as purity) but negative ones in Asian countries (such as death). While it has the merit of being striking and of drawing attention to the notion of cultural differences, this example is also too simplistic and therefore produces a general recommendation (localize packaging) that is not always relevant.

In most cultures, colors have positive AND negative meanings, which can be activated (or not) depending on the context and their articulation with other signs. For example, white can ALSO refer to death in the West, if we look at the visual representation of near-death experiences (white light at the end of the tunnel) or ghosts (white shroud). Furthermore, in many market situations, consumers (whether Asian or Western) seek to consume products they perceive as exotic. Localizing packaging in such situations results in a loss of perceived authenticity and diminishes the product's appeal.

Our results show that a packaging design can remain intelligible to very different cultures if it uses motivated signs. It is therefore possible to create a design that remains typical of its origin and at the same time understandable in its export markets.

The results also show that Chinese consumers can appreciate label styles other than the classic "château" wine (see bottle 8). In fact, all labels are associated in equivalent proportions with the "top-of-the-range" and "good quality" themes (in the center of the map shown in figure 3). It therefore seems possible to diversify the positioning strategies of French wines by adopting more varied label designs. This would better respond to the diversification of Chinese consumer segments that various recent studies have revealed.


Peiyao Cheng, a researcher in the design department at Harbin Institute of Technology, and Wenhua li, a researcher at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, contributed to this article.The Conversation

Franck Celhay, Associate professor, Montpellier Business School - UGEI and Josselin Masson, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, University of Montpellier

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.