A new Chinese name for Tmall.com - and now it's accepting ideas from the public for a new logo and mascot.
Alibaba’s B2C e-commerce site, Tmall.com, which stands for Taobao Mall, is changing its Chinese name in a bid to give itself more distinctive branding. Starting next month, it’ll be called ‘Tian Mao’ in Chinese, which roughly means Sky Cat, and will have a new logo and mascot to match. But the URL – and its English moniker – will remain the same.
Tmall was launched on its own domain in November 2010, and last summer was spun off as a separate company. It grew from the wildly popular Taobao C2C shopping platform, and its original name came from there as well. But now it seems that Alibaba feels there’s not a clear enough distinction between the two, hence the need for a fresh name. In the fast-growing B2C sector, Tmall is the market leader but facing growing pressure from 360Buy and other specialist online malls.
An Alibaba spokeswoman told PO:
We believe the name 天猫 portrays the platform’s characteristics and what the brand represents: trendy, high-quality and fashion-forward.
Last September, the site opened its platform to rival sites, and it also hosts numerous branded stores.
In a notice on the site, in both English and Chinese, it says the company is now letting anyone “pitch for the new branding system.” It explains:
All kinds of organizations and individuals are welcomed to participate – design firms, individual designers, students from art schools and other amateurs all can submit your works and take part.
It runs from today until February 14th.
Hopefully there will be prizes given, because Tmall today announced that it’s rolling in cash, having hit 100 billion RMB (US$15.84 billion) in sold items on the site in 2011 – a figure 3.5 times greater than it achieved in 2010.