After looking into it further, the story became even more interesting. In Korea, Michelin’s official Korean name is the same for both its tire business and its restaurant guide. The Korean subsidiary is called Michelin, and the officially published book is also titled The Michelin Guide. In other words, the company itself has never used two different names. And yet, people still commonly use a different Korean pronunciation for the guide. One possible explanation is that the expression long used by the media and the public has simply remained embedded in everyday language. But that did not feel sufficient. Over time, the official name should naturally have replaced the popular one, yet that never happened. People still use one pronunciation when talking about cars and another when talking about food, and no one finds it strange. From that moment, the question stopped being about pronunciation and became a question of branding.

In brand consulting, many companies invest considerable time and money in naming. They review hundreds of candidates for a new brand, check whether each can be registered as a trademark, and examine pronunciation and cultural implications across different markets. Once they finally choose a name after such a demanding process, they often believe that branding has now begun. Of course, a good name matters. But the longer I work on branding projects, the more often I realize that something else matters even more than the name itself. It is how people remember that name. The same name may represent trust to one person, evoke an image of high prices to another, or remind someone else of a childhood experience. A company creates a name, but what consumers remember is never the name alone. They remember the experiences surrounding it.

< Image source: Michelin Guide >

When you think about it, we do not remember brands as words. We remember them as scenes. When we hear Starbucks, what may come to mind first is not its green logo, but the memory of sitting in one of its stores for hours with a laptop open. When we hear IKEA, we may recall not the furniture itself, but the experience of walking through its enormous store and showrooms while imagining a future home. Apple is no different. We do not remember the spelling of the word Apple. We remember the first time we held an iPhone or the sensation of opening its packaging. Ultimately, a brand is not so much a device for storing a name as it is a device for storing experiences. The name is merely a small switch that brings those experiences back.

Seen from this perspective, Michelin reveals something fascinating. When we think of Michelin in relation to automobiles, the world that comes to mind is one of technology, safety, heritage, and engineering. But the moment we begin talking about restaurants, the same Michelin name takes on an entirely different meaning. It evokes chefs who spend years working toward a single star, small restaurants discovered and trusted while traveling, and dining experiences so sought after that reservations are nearly impossible. The company uses the same name, but people already remember two entirely different worlds. Perhaps, unconsciously, we did not want those two worlds to collide, and so we naturally created two different pronunciations for Michelin in Korean.

This leads us to reconsider brand extension. Many companies attempt to expand a successful brand into a new category because they believe it is more efficient to reuse a name that has already earned trust. But in the consumer’s mind, a brand has already become a world of its own. When a new business connects naturally with that existing world, the brand can become stronger. When it does not, the expansion may destabilize even the original image. Brand extension, therefore, is not simply a matter of using the same name. It is a question of how convincingly a brand can create a new world within that name. Ultimately, a brand’s competitiveness does not depend on how widely its name is used, but on whether that name can maintain consistent trust across different contexts.

That is why I came to believe that this seemingly trivial question reveals something essential about branding. We often think branding is the work of creating a good name, but in reality, building a brand is not the process of creating a name. It is the process of accumulating meaning. A company may create a brand name, but people’s experiences determine which scenes become attached to it, which emotions it evokes, and how it is used within a particular culture. A brand may be born in a corporate meeting room, but it is reinterpreted in people’s daily lives and sometimes acquires new meanings in ways the company never intended. Perhaps the popular Korean pronunciation of the Michelin Guide is not simply an incorrect pronunciation. Perhaps it is another form of brand experience, created as people brought the brand into their own culture.

Branding is not the work of creating a name. It is the work of building a world within that name that people can remember for a long time. Truly great brands accumulate enough meaning to contain multiple worlds within a single name. That is why, when designing a brand, the question we must continue to ask is not how impressive the name sounds, but what people will remember when they hear that name years from now. A brand’s true asset is not the name written on a trademark certificate, but the meaning that has accumulated in people’s memories over many years.