One sign that an emerging country’s consumers are getting less poor - but aren’t yet as rich as marketers would like - is the profusion of new brands. A-list companies that want to boost sales in places like China and India without going too obviously downmarket can offer lower-end products under assumed names, until their customers can afford to buy the real thing.

That appears to be the thinking behind Nissan’s decision to launch a separate car brand in China with its local partner Dongfeng Motor. The new passenger vehicles - given the brand name Qi Chen (”start of the morning”) - are likely to sell from 50,000 yuan ($7,360), compared with 69,900 yuan ($10,300) for the cheapest Nissan-badged model.

Nissan is going for an unpretentious domestic image for the new line: Qi Chen’s logo (pictured) looks like the five stars on China’s flag. The first Qi Chen models are scheduled to go on sale in 2012, by which time Nissan hopes to have boosted production capacity in China by about 50 per cent, to 900,000 vehicles a year.