Let’s all hope that the Supplemental Trademark Register is not on the death watch.
It appears though to be on life support, at times, and especially with the USPTO’s heightened focus on “merely informational” matter, including laudatory messages.
This is a common basis for registration refusal nowadays: “Merely informational matter fails to function as a
When ideas from different realms converge in a single moment of time, a new blog post is born.
“Catcalling” — albeit a rebranded, reimagined, or redefined version of it — recently has been front and center in a political Twitter storm and remains a lightning rod in the non-stop news
For a few months now, the Minneapolis skyway system has been flooded with a variety of fresh, creative, eye-popping advertising to promote Pepsi’s new bubly sparkling water collection:
Although not a lie (the bottles I’ve seen clearly reference Pepsi), you’d never know from this ad or the trademark registration that Pepsi is behind bubly, since
Hat tip to Sri for capturing this image of a passing by backpack, illustrating how much a little spacing can end up making all the difference in the world, when it comes to brand identity:
To the extent, IV IKE, I VIKE, or even IVIKE might be a legitimate backpack brand, when the letter
The grocery aisles are fertile grounds for my keyboard, as you know. And, while I’m generally far more interested in coffee grounds than tea leaves (unless we’re speaking of the iced variety or reading between the lines of court decisions), the above shown box of tea bags caught my eye.
What initially captured my
As you know, we’ve spun a lot of fabric over the last few years on the topic of brand and trademark truncation. Marketers seem to love the informality, emotionality, and efficiency of truncated brand names. I suppose trademark types love them too, since they can have the tendency to spin off a variety of
The strategic use of color can make all the difference in the world — particularly the trademark world — when creating the visual identity for a brand, as color can be a very helpful legal tool in communicating the brand’s underlying meaning.
And the meaning of a brand and its trademark, or a portion of its trademark, can have many legal implications, including but not limited to whether the mark is descriptive or suggestive, strong or weak, inherently distinctive or not, whether a disclaimer might be required, whether or not a likelihood of confusion exists, and whether or not there is a valid fair use defense.
Especially when a brand name is composed of compressed or telescoped words, the intended meaning behind a brand name can be lost on consumers without the careful use of color combinations:
Without the benefit of the colored-version of the current PETSMART logo on the left, how would word-of-mouth discussions regarding the brand go, if all one had access to was the black/white version on the right? Would the PETSMART brand name be pronounced as PET SMART, PETS MART, or PETS SMART (the last option being the telescoped version where the compressed mark shares a letter between the two words that form it)? Would the bouncing ball punctuation alone be enough to steer the meaning toward PET SMART and away from the descriptive PETS MART?
The answers to these questions have important legal implications since PETS MART is likely descriptive, weak, and susceptible to the fair use defense, while PET SMART or PETS SMART is likely suggestive, strong, and less susceptible to fair use. So, when the words are compressed, and spacing cannot answer these critical questions, there is a strong legal incentive to clarify for consumers that the elements of the compound mark are PET SMART, not PETS MART, as the coloring shown above accomplishes.
To be sure, the smart use of color is not the only tool available to influence the meaning of a compound word mark. Upper and lower case lettering can help convey valuable information as well. Staying with the PETSMART example, there was a time when the brand’s visual identity looked like this on the company’s website:
Because all the lettering in this depiction of the visual identity is the same color, the smaller size of the "s" between PET and MART probably create a pretty strong argument that the compound mark is PetsMart, not PetSmart. Interestingly, an even earlier treatment of the logo uses the red/blue color combination to communicate the PET SMART meaning, but it is somewhat visually contradicted by the diminutive appearance of the MART element, as shown here.
So, who do you suppose had more influence on the various transitions of the PETSMART logo over time, legal or marketing?
Finally, for a stroll down memory lane on Duets with a couple of other posts from the past, relating to visual identity, see below the jump.Continue Reading When a Brand’s Visual Identity Has Serious Trademark Implications
Common sense probably dictates that if you take the time and effort to create, build, and position signage to help sell what it is you’re selling, the sign should be visible, right?
Especially in these tough times, when you’re selling real estate, and this is the view from the road:
Then again, maybe not, especially if you’ve adopted a business
Wendy’s is a brand that claims to not cut corners: "For Wendy’s, square isn’t so much a shape as a promise to not cut corners."
As a trademark type, the focus on the square shape and surrounding symbolism leaves me wondering whether Wendy’s is cleverly laying the groundwork for claiming non-traditional trademark rights in
Just so you know, it about pushed me over the edge to have a blog post title with no capitalization. Not even one letter. In other words, all minuscules, no majuscules. It doesn’t seem right — to me anyway, as a trademark type.
Just like the first letter in the first word of a
