Duets Blog : Creativity and the Law: DuetsBlog

Perhaps this is a good time for Brand Introspection with Uncle Buck: As David Cameron's On Brands Blog teaches: "You need to know what your brand does well. You need to know where your brand disappoints. And to truly know those things, you need to take an honest look at your brand – how you see it and, of utmost importance, how others see it."

It is my understanding that re-branding and name changes are made "usually in an attempt to distance [the brand] from certain negative connotations of the previous branding." As you may recall, I previously have called for name changes and rebranding when a name (Redskins) or symbol (Chief Wahoo) offends, and that is certainly not the case with the Drury Inn brand name, but it seems to me, when a name actually detracts from the positive attributes of an underlying brand, isn't a name change or rebrand in order?

After all, doesn't any hotel chain need to pass the "'Where did you stay? Oh, we stayed at a Drury Inn . . . Oh, I'm so sorry, what was the name of the hotel? so we can avoid it on our next trip'" test?

Now, for Drury family members who might be leery of a name change, marketing expert Seth Godin notes, going all the way back to square one is underrated and "nicer than people expect." But, if you're still not convinced that Drury Inn should go back to square one with its name, what about a new tagline, as a compromise?

Drury Inn's current tagline apparently is: "The Extras Aren't Extra." Nice enough, but it ignores the pink elephant in the hotel room. The name too easily associates with a word that is a far distance from inviting or comforting, attributes of importance to those willing to spend money and a night away from home. Interestingly, some of the hotel chain's consumer champions appear to have spotted the pink elephant in the hotel room and are using it to the brand's advantage:

"Drury not dreary, but for the wayward and weary."

"This Drury Definately Not Dreary"

"Far from being the Dreary Inn."

Hoover's coverage even plays on the name: "Drury isn't dreary, but it is for the weary."

Here's my "consumer hat" suggestion for a new tagline: "Drury Inn, Everything But Dreary."

What is your recommendation?

This is how Holiday Inn describes the claimed green lighting trademark:

"The mark consists of green lighting formed by four light fixtures placed in a symmetrical fashion near the entryway of the building. The lower set of two green lights are evenly placed on columns to the right and left of the entry way and direct the green lighting downward, while the upper set of two green lights are evenly placed on the building wall above the entry way and direct the green lighting upwards."

It took the Trademark Office only three weeks to issue registration refusals (green lighting refusal in pdf here).

Surprisingly, the Trademark Office did not issue an initial functional refusal as it typically does when trade dress and single color marks are claimed, which would put the burden on the applicant to establish non-functionality, but it nevertheless refused registration for the following reasons:

• Non-distinctive three-dimensional configuration
• Mere decoration or ornamentation
• Acquired distinctiveness not shown
• Customary in hotel industry to have lighting near entrances for illumination/security

Having said all that, the concept of protecting a lighting scheme as a trademark, even a colored one, even in the hospitality industry, is certainly do-able with early and close collaboration between trademark and marketing types.

They are not common, however, as evidenced by the Trademark Office's inability to locate a prior registration to bar approval of the Holiday Inn applications on likelihood of confusion grounds. Indeed, the only federally-registered non-traditional lighting mark in the hospitality industry that I'm aware of, despite some admittedly modest searching, is one I obtained for Mystic Lake Casino & Hotel more than ten years ago, covering "a formation of light beams resembling the conical framework of a tipi emanating from a circular source of light."

My humble prediction is that a strong showing of look-for advertising is what it will take for Holiday Inn to avoid having their green and blue lights simply burn out at the Trademark Office.

Holiday Inn has until November to respond to the initial registration refusals, so stay tuned here on DuetsBlog for further developments.

In case you're wondering, the inspiration for this post came from Holiday Inn's re-branding effort with the above H logo. A three-year re-branding effort that apparently started back in 2007, but has only recently shown itself in suburban Minneapolis. It got me thinking how Holiday Inn must have had single-letter trademark envy to move in this truncated direction because when I think of single-letter hotel brands, only W comes to mind (at least before starting this post). 

W Hotels has done a very nice job with its branding, it seems to me, especially with the recent remodel of historic Foshay Tower in downtown Minneapolis. It's interesting, however, that W seems unmoved by a host of others using and registering "its letter" in connection with other hotels, here (Wyndham), here (Woodfin), here (Chickasaw Nation), here (The Westbury in London), here (Watermark), and here (Willard), especially since Starwood, the owner of W Hotels, owns the letter W as a trademark without any type or style limitations. Perhaps W is unmoved because at least some of these appear to predate W, begging the question of how Starwood was able to register the letter W with no type or style limitations in the first place.

In addition, Holiday Inn is certainly not the only or the first with a hotel or plans for a hotel to think about truncating its name to the single letter H in a trademark and logo, see here (Hilton), here (Hersha), here (Hansa Urbana), here (Hearthstone), here (Haute), here (Heritage), and here (Heidi Klum).

Turns out, lots of other hotels have truncated their names into single-letter logos too, which makes me wonder about what the scope of their respective rights might be.

Having said that, some letters may not be well-suited for hotel branding at all. Given that hotels are routinely graded (typically on number of stars), I haven't checked, but I assume the letters B through D and F are available, for obvious branding reasons. And, sorry Gatorade, flanking the flunking or failing letter F, at least in Malasia, G appears taken, and Westin recently grabbed a stylized E, with Carlisle taking an interest in E too, not to mention Embassy Suites and its E.

As you may have guessed, Renaissance is not the only R out there in the hotel world (here (Ramada), here (Ravel), here (Regent), here (Registry), and here (Rockresorts)), but U Hotels & Resorts appears to be surprisingly unique, as does O Hotel. So, here we may have identified at least one caution for Oprah to consider carefully, down the road, in the event she sets her sights on extending her brand of O into the hotel industry.

Last, but certainly not least, as Gatorade must have learned when it truncated to G, blogged previously here, it is not easy to own a single-letter as a trademark, at least one that enjoys any meaningful scope.