Marketing to China: the numbers that win or lose the deal

The short version

• 8 is the number to court. It sounds close to the word for wealth and prosperity.
• 9, 6 and 3 sit comfortably alongside it, echoing longevity, smooth progress and life.
• 4 is the one to keep away from. It sounds almost exactly like the word for death.
• 14 is worse still, heard as something near "certain death".

Why 8 opens doors

The affection for 8 runs deep. Beijing opened its 2008 Olympic Games at eight minutes past eight in the evening, on the eighth day of the eighth month, a date chosen for its fortune rather than its convenience.

That belief carries straight into business. A Chinese contact will study a business card closely, and the telephone number on it matters as much as the name. The more eights it holds, the higher the status it signals. Numbers thick with 8s and 9s command a premium, and registration plates carrying lucky runs are auctioned for sums that dwarf the value of the car beneath them.

Marketers have put this to work for years. When the realtor Fred Hsieh set out to sell Monterey Park in California to Taiwanese buyers, he leaned on the area's telephone code, 818, as a selling point, and helped turn the suburb into what became known as the Chinese Beverly Hills.

So give the 8 a job. Product codes, price points, quotation references, invoice numbers, model names, the digits in a contact number, all of it is fair game.

Why 4 ends conversations

At the far end sits the number 4, and the wariness around it is genuine. Much of East Asia is tetraphobic, sidestepping the figure wherever possible. Hotels and apartment blocks across the region skip the fourth, fourteenth and twenty-fourth floors, sometimes omitting the forties altogether, so a lift might leap from 39 to 50. Homes on those levels tend to sell for less.

For anyone selling into the market, the takeaway is simple. Keep 4 out of your quotes, your pricing, your serial numbers and your contact details. A proposal that lands on a 4 can stall for reasons your prospect may never put into words. Where the choice is yours, settle on an 8 or a 9 instead.

What this means for your marketing

None of this comes to light if you treat translation as a straight word-for-word exchange. A machine will render your price list flawlessly and still leave a 4 sitting in the lead position, because it reads language, not superstition. Catching it takes the judgement of someone who knows the culture from the inside. That is the human part of the work, and it is the part that guards your brand.

A number is the gentlest case. The same care decides whether colour, imagery, idiom and tone arrive intact, and not one of them survives a purely literal rendering.

Before you launch

If you are preparing to sell into China, or into any market where meaning shifts with culture, this is the point at which expert human localisation pays for itself. Brightlines works across Chinese and every other major language to make your message land the way you meant it.