Love the new bold look of the Mello Yello can, and it’s hard to miss the prominent abbreviation to MY, along with the trademark assertion: This is My World.
Actually, as we have written before, there are more than a few operating within the world of MY, and that’s not limited to our writing about pillows and other such talk.
Yet, it looks like Coca-Cola was able to secure the stylized depiction of the MY abbreviation as a trademark for soft drinks, and the federal registration should issue any day now:
My questions: Why no standard character trademark application for just the word MY too, or is Coca-Cola trying to avoid conflict with another MY in their soda space with a different style?
And, for our marketing types: Would you promote MY as an acronym or initialism, if you were Coca-Cola? And, would you eventually shed or diminish the originating words Mello Yello?
Seems to be a mixed message here: Coca-Cola appears to describe its mark as an initialism to the USPTO with “the letters ‘M’ and ‘Y’ in a stacked, stylized form,” but the message to consumers shown above in the billboard ad appears to invite seeing and reading the letters as an acronym and the word MY, meaning “of or belonging to” the speaker or writer.