–Dan Kelly, Attorney

Do you recognize this logo?

Does it make you hungry?  Ok, maybe not.

Let’s try some word associations instead.  I’ll list some words, and you just shout out the first thing that comes to mind for each one:

CHEWNIVERSITY

CHOMPENSATION

SATISFLYING

ANTIHUNGERESTABLISHMENTARIANISM

How’d you do?  The answer to this mystery is after the jump . . .

Anybody come up with “Snickers” for any of these?  Mars, Incorporated has embarked upon an interesting marketing campaign.  To the ordinary man on the street, it looks like this.  What Mars is really doing, though, is establishing trademark rights in a parallelogram with the color blue inside the parallelogram and the colors white and red lining the outside of the parallelogram.  The campaign uses a host of coined words (termed “Snacklish”) in what otherwise appears to be the SNICKERS logo.  Like this:

For eons, we have been seeing this:

In this logo, the word “SNICKERS” is dominant.  The white parallelogram with the red border is a fairly non-distinctive background.  What Mars is doing, though, is re-establishing this logo by filling it with so much noise that we cannot help but notice the overall pattern.  Suddenly the white parallelogram with a red border is becoming a common, even dominant, element in this design – it doesn’t really matter what words appear in blue in the middle.  It will not be long before people start clearly associating the overall design with a certain well-known candy bar.  Pretty clever.  (By the way, I would say that this is a very subtle form of “look for” advertising — a sort of viral look for advertising.)

Bonus Question:  Do you see another non-traditional trademark being established in this campaign?  Any guesses?