Beijing, 2010.

Meituan began as a website selling one discounted deal a day. Chinese Wikipedia says Wang Xing, who had earlier founded the social network Xiaonei (later Renren) and the microblog Fanfou, set up Meituan.com in January 2010 on the model of the American group-buying site Groupon, and that it went online on 4 March 2010. English Wikipedia names Wang as the founder and gives the company’s headquarters as Beijing. The name is written 美团 in Chinese characters and Měituán in pinyin, and the company has kept the pinyin spelling as its Latin-letter name.

The early site looked nothing like today’s brand. PingWest reported in June 2019 that Meituan.com in 2010 used a colour between blue and green as its background, with a large grey bar at the top carrying the two characters of the name in light grey. Wang wanted simple header images for each deal, the report said, because phone screens were small and busy pictures were hard to read there. As the business moved into film tickets, hotels and food delivery, the app icon stayed in the same blue-green.

Group buying drew a crowd of copycats. Chinese Wikipedia says similar sites multiplied so quickly that the media called the contest the “war of a thousand group-buying sites”, and that from 2012 Meituan tried other businesses, launching hotel bookings, film ticketing (later spun off as Maoyan) and the delivery service Meituan Waimai. TechNode reported in October 2015 that Meituan had grown out of group buying in 2010 and by then competed in on-demand local services, film and event ticketing, and hotel and attraction bookings.

Food delivery gave the brand a second colour long before the app adopted it. PingWest said that in 2015 Meituan began running its own delivery riders, who wore yellow, and that yellow gradually became the identifying colour of Meituan Waimai. When the company listed in Hong Kong on 20 September 2018, the same report said, yellow-clad delivery riders struck the gong with Wang Xing.

One company, then one colour.

The name grew longer before it grew shorter. On 8 October 2015 Meituan and Dianping agreed to combine, TechNode reported that day. Dianping had started in 2003 as a ratings and reviews service, the report said, while Meituan had started in group buying in 2010; Meituan was backed by Alibaba and Dianping by Tencent, and both chief executives were to become co-CEOs and co-chairmen of the new company. Chinese Wikipedia says the merged business took the name Meituan Dianping and that both brands kept running independently. The reviews app still trades as Dazhong Dianping, English Wikipedia says.

The 2019 rebrand was built around a single colour. On 13 June 2019 Meituan announced that its brand colour would change from blue to yellow, Digitaling reported, with a launch video in the app titled “New colour, more exciting”, a new logo on the home screen and a transitional yellow icon labelled “new” ahead of a full switch due around 30 June. The company’s mini-program, Weibo and WeChat accounts were to change too. Offline, the report said, bikes, power banks, payment QR codes, card terminals and shop-door stickers would all move to yellow over time. Chinese Wikipedia calls the new standard colour “Meituan yellow”.

PingWest, in a report of 15 June 2019, gave the design team’s reasons. A Meituan design lead told the site that yellow is very bright and easy to spot in a street scene, and that the food at the heart of the business is largely warm in colour. Because a very light yellow tires the eye and is hard to read on white, the team pushed the shade towards more red light and lower brightness while keeping it yellow rather than orange. The old blue-green, the lead said, was hard to tell apart from other blue brands. Co-founder Wang Huiwen wanted the offline and online brands joined, the report added, so that any Meituan service would be recognisable from a distance.

The colour also absorbed an acquisition. Meituan Dianping bought the bike-sharing company Mobike in April 2018, and in January 2019 it said Mobike would be renamed Meituan Bike and folded into the Meituan app, TechNode reported on 23 January 2019. PingWest said replacement bikes would be mainly yellow, replacing Mobike’s own colours with Meituan’s.

Family names, renames and riders.

Company brands from India and China often carry their history in the name itself. Many Indian groups are named after a founding family, and the surname on the letterhead can stand for a bank, a steel works and a soap at the same time. In that setting a logo has to work across very different businesses, so the identity tends to lean on one wordmark, one colour and a consistent way of setting the family name rather than on a single product picture.

Chinese internet and retail companies grew up with two names: a Chinese name in characters and a Latin-letter name for domains, app stores and overseas markets. Some began with a pinyin spelling, some shortened a long name to a few letters, and some changed their Latin name entirely as they moved beyond their home market. Each rename has to keep the visual memory of the old mark while making the new one easy to read.

Mascots and uniforms do a lot of the work. A cartoon animal can appear on an app icon, a parcel and a billboard, and a delivery rider’s jacket, helmet and box turn a city street into a moving sign. For designers, these everyday surfaces are where the colour and the character of a company brand are seen most often.

Kangaroo ears and a cheetah.

One piece of the delivery brand sits on riders’ heads. In July 2020 Jiemian reported that the ears many people took for rabbit ears on Meituan riders’ helmets were in fact kangaroo ears, matching the kangaroo in Meituan Waimai’s own logo. Since 2018, the report said, Meituan Waimai had handed out kangaroo helmet decorations to riders every 17 July, its Rider Festival, and its Weibo account used the ears as gifts for followers. As photographs of riders wearing them spread online, Meituan began selling the ears as merchandise, with a set of advertisements written in the style of Apple slogans that promised to “redefine ears”.

The company shortened its name in 2020. Digitaling reported in September 2020 that the board had proposed simplifying the English name from Meituan Dianping to Meituan and adopting 美团 as the Chinese name in place of 美团点评, to build a single brand image and help users and merchants see the range of its services. The same report said the lobby wall at the headquarters in Beijing’s Wangjing district had already shown only “美团” since July 2020. English Wikipedia says the new name took effect on 30 September 2020.

Meituan uses a different name outside mainland China. On 22 May 2023 it launched a food delivery app in Hong Kong called KeeTa, starting in Mong Kok and Tai Kok Tsui and planning to cover the whole territory by the end of that year, TechNode reported that day. Meituan said in its press release that the name draws inspiration from the cheetah. Inside Retail Asia reported the next day that the app offered an “on-time promise”, which the company says gives users vouchers when eligible orders arrive well after the estimated time. English Wikipedia describes Keeta as Meituan’s international brand name used outside mainland China.

For a design guide, Meituan shows how one colour can be stretched from an app icon to bikes, payment stickers and the clothes of a delivery fleet, and how a mascot can live as a pair of ears rather than a full character. Compare JD.com, another Chinese company with an animal mascot, and Grab, a delivery and ride-hailing brand with riders in its own colour. For this guide we use yellow, a deep ochre and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Meituan’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.