June 2009

What’s the first thing you think about when you’re naming a company or a product? Securing a domain? Avoiding trademark conflict? Sounding different from your competitors?

All are important concerns. But I contend that the first thing you should think about is this:

A name is the title of your story.

Yes, you’re naming your company or your product. But what you’re really doing is putting a title on the story you’re telling investors, shareholders, customers, and employees.

If you’re smart and lucky, the name you choose will be the title of a great story. A best-seller. A legend. A tale told around the campfire for generations.

If you’re haphazard or confused or pretentious or timid, your name will end up on the equivalent of the remainders table at your local bookstore: piles of copies at 70 percent off.

You can have a great story that nobody wants to read because the title is pedestrian or perplexing or pompous.

Or you can create demand for your story by giving it a title that tells just enough without giving away the plot.

So before you do any internal namestorming or hire a name developer, spend some time thinking about the story your company or product needs to tell.Continue Reading The Title of Your Story

A lot can be learned about personal branding from Winnie the Pooh & Friends:

Many years ago we had a family friend who believed she was able to simplify anyone she encountered into a character from Winnie the Pooh & Friends. He’s a real Tigger, so impulsive. She’s a Piglet, such a worry-wort. He’s so Rabbit, a regular self-proclaimed know-it-all. She is so curiously Roo! What a hard-working Gopher! She is as loyal a friend as Pooh. Could he be any more gloomy? Such an Eeyore! And on and on. By the way, as you may have guessed, she was a real Tigger, bouncy, impulsive, and more than a bit annoying, at times. Honestly, I don’t recall who she pegged me to be.

Anyway, I had totally forgotten these memories until I recently agreed to speak about Personal Branding and Trademarks at an Annual Paralegal Convention, where the overall convention theme was “Maximize Your Marketability,” and for some reason, they came rushing back to me.

Why? I suppose, because Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, Roo, and Eeyore are not only copyrighted fictional characters, but they also are protectable trademarks (and at least Pooh, Tigger, and Roo are the subject of a pending trademark opposition proceeding between Disney and Stephen Slesinger, Inc.), and perhaps most importantly, they all represent personal branding caricatures too.

Now, I’m not one to believe in the existence of single-dimension people. Near as I can tell, most of us share multiple characteristics from multiple Pooh & Friends characters among many others. Having said that, for what its worth, my two cents on the subject of Personal Branding is that if you’re not careful, thoughtful, and intentional about building and cultivating a multi-dimensional personal brand, you run the risk of being unfairly reduced to a one-dimensional caricature with no reach or respect beyond your most dominant skill or personality trait.

In other words, if your sky is always falling with Piglet-style worries that never come true, it will be hard for anyone to take your concerns seriously, even when they are Christopher Robin legitimate. Perhaps Chicken Little is a distant Disney cousin and The Boy Who Cried Wolf a distant Aesop cousin of “a very small animal” named Piglet.Continue Reading Personal Branding and Trademarks: Avoiding One-Dimensional Caricatures

Notice anything special about this pair of photographs featuring two different Holiday Inn front entrances? OK, putting aside that the one on the right — with green lighting — seems to have attracted, at least, a few cars, whereas the “blue light special” on the left appears to stage a full house with virtually every room light on, but ironically it reveals an empty parking lot.

                       

Well, these aren’t ordinary photographs, they are trademark specimens of use; Six Continents Hotels, owner of the Holiday Inn brand, claims that they depict a pair of non-traditional trademarks, having filed them with the U.S. Trademark Office in April 2009, and asserting that use of the “lighting” marks commenced back in January 2008. So, we aren’t talking about the new H logo previously blogged about here or the old Holiday Inn word mark — those are standard and traditional single-letter logo and word trademarks. In case you’re wondering, no sign of any red or yellow lights for Holiday Inn, at least, on the Trademark Office database.Continue Reading Holiday Inn Lights It Up With a Pair of Non-Traditional Trademarks

— Karen Brennan, Attorney

As an opening note, I am able to write about more than being a new mom, but it does bring up previously unexplored and interesting topics. Today: Baby Einstein. While I am sure most mothers agree that television is not the best thing for an infant, given the success of the…

Moore’s Law holds that the power of an integrated circuit will double every two years. That prediction, made in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, has proved remarkably durable.

The continued application of Moore’s Law has taken us in a few decades from crude transistor radios to handheld information devices packing more power than entire rooms of mainframe computers that sent the first spaceships to the moon.

And it’s unleashed an unprecedented burst of creativity, as the reach of the Internet allows people from around the globe to exchange information and build on each other’s ideas at dizzying speed.Continue Reading Thriving In A Speeded-Up World

Hotel chains appear determined to own single-letter trademarks anymore. Yes, the lodging industry appears headed toward serving up a regular bowl of alphabet soup you might say. Do you recognize any of these single letter hotel marks?

Mark Image  Mark Image 

Mark ImageU Hotels & Resorts - Luxury Hotels in ThailandFree Clipart Picture of a Yellow Question Mark with a Black OutlineContinue Reading W H O, R U? Exposing Single-Letter Trademark Envy in Hotel Branding

It is probably fair to say from my initial Just Verb It? post, the many articles referenced in that post, the substantial panel of commentary to the post, and additional interest in the topic, that at least two truths about “brandverbing” are beyond much, if any, debate: (1) Lawyers (including the International Trademark Association’s guidelines…

–Sharon Armstrong, Attorney

With Independence Day just around the corner, perhaps it is time to reflect on some of the freedoms that we enjoy by residing in the land of purple mountains majesty. Freedom of speech? Check. Freedom of assembly? Check. Freedom to use other people’s trademarks, the very basis from which their brands spring, in descriptive and/or non-source identifying ways? Check.

The doctrine of fair use in trademark law can be a great freedom (or a great bane) depending on which side of the doctrine one falls – user or trademark owner. Although there are two branches of fair use – descriptive and nominative – for all intents and purposes, the non-owner user of a trademark may successfully meet the criteria for fair use of a mark provided that he shows he’s not using the mark to identify his source of goods and services.Continue Reading Celebrate Your Freedom to Use Cheesy (ahem, Leafy) Puns