Question Mark Brands?
A couple of months ago I blogged about Branding Exclamations!
Before that I blogged about Increasingly Intense Ellipsis Branding . . . .
Now, it appears I must revisit the subject of punctuation mark branding given Cadbury Adams' new Mega Mystery Stride brand gum, prominently featuring a question mark logo on the packaging where the S logo normally appears.
The mystery apparently surrounds the presently undisclosed flavor of the gum. The unknown flavor appears to be part of Stride's claimed Ridiculously Long Lasting Gum, not to be confused, of course, with Wrigley's Curiously Strong mints and gum (Altoids).
Anyway, my daughter brought a pack of the ? gum home and said, "Daddy, you should blog about this," so now you know the inspiration for my curiously strong or ridiculously long attention to this subject.
I fully expected to find a pending trademark application filed by Cadbury Adams for the "?" symbol, given its ridiculously flavorful interest in single letter chewing gum brands. To my surprise, however, I found none, at least yet.
As you might have imagined, I did find some "?" trademarks of others, as shown below. Do you recognize any of them? Each "?" image is linked to the corresponding trademark record at the U.S. Trademark Office.
Turns out, there is a ? trademark battle heating up too. Not in the world of confections, but rather in the world of fashion. Just days ago, Guess IP Holder L.P., owner of the famous Guess brand, filed a Trademark Opposition against one of the above Question Mark logos, guess which one?
It asserted ownership of these federally-registered trademarks:
But not any of these, for some reason:
To find out, click here for a link to a copy of the Notice of Opposition.
Any more questions?
