One of my passions is to find common and favorable ground between legal and marketing types.
One of the readings during week three of Seth Godin’s intensive altMBA workshop reminded me of a great example to illustrate how a valid marketing goal can align with strong legal protection.
An excerpt from Seth’s All Marketers are
For those of you who have been with us since the beginning of this wonderful collaboration of legal and marketing types, known as DuetsBlog, you also know we have a mascot dubbed Duey — he’s depicted in the squirrel graphic at the top of this page. Here is his story, as told by Aaron
– Mark Prus, Principal, NameFlash
Almost everyone loves a good magician. The magician’s sleight of hand technique in making a coin or playing card disappear delights us, as we usually take pleasure in being fooled in this manner. Once fooled, our brain rapidly kicks into gear and tries to figure out how he or she
What best describes your work? Inexpensive? Cost effective? Robotic? Low budget? High volume?
Or, do you deliver excellence — unique, distinctive, valuable, sculpted, tailored, and handmade solutions with your wealth of professional skill and expertise?
If your main focus is on delivering the lowest possible cost, you best be selling a commodity.
Creating and protecting
A hot dog is a type of sandwich, and “footlong” denotes a type, category, or class of sandwiches (those measuring about a foot in length), making “footlong” a generic term and part of the public domain — incapable of serving as a trademark for any kind of
What does Google have in common with Sasquatch? Well, perhaps one possible point of similarity is that if you mess with either, you might get yourself seriously messed up in the process.
With respect to the defensive power of Sasquatch, a local Wisconsin business success story, Jack Link’s Beef Jerky, has gotten much notoriety with its series of hilarious 30-second
In the wake of all the discussion and debate over “trademark bullying,” NFIB (National Federation of Independent Businesses), the self-proclaimed Voice of Small Business, recently offered its members and followers “5 Steps to Avoid Corporate Trademark Bullying“:
Welcome to another edition of AlphaWatch (the next one in our queue), where we explore the reach of single-letter trademarks, this time focusing on the letter Q and the single-letter branding cues it might suggest to consumers:
Are you able to name the un-truncated version of this single-letter mark and brand?
My daughter could. The answer is below the jump.Continue Reading Taking Branding Cues from Q in the Single-Letter Trademark Queue
Seth Godin’s recent post entitled Subtlety, deconstructed, struck a chord with me, and should strike a chord with all trademark types and the brand owners they represent. Here is my favorite excerpt:
Subtle design and messaging challenge the user to make her own connections instead of spelling out every detail. Connections we make are more powerful
Guest Blogger Anthony Shore of Operative Words, recently wrote about the naming pendulum swinging away from arbitrary names and back toward brand names having an honest, straightforward, and even humble quality, in Truth is Stronger Than Fiction.
Another way of saying it might be: naming is going back to the basics. I recently came across a