The speaking circuit has come to a grinding halt, as it should, to slow the virus spread. My hope is to share some of that in-person content with each of you here.
Now more than ever, we need to receive nourishment, so if you don’t receive Seth Godin’s daily posts, you’re really missing out,
You might recall that several months ago, we blogged about an intriguing trademark infringement battle between Buc-ee’s and Choke Canyon. In June 2018, the Texan rivals competing in the over-sized gas station market–a real niche, to be sure–went to trial, with Buc-ee’s arguing that Choke Canyon’s alligator logo infringed Buc-ee’s beaver mark:
Incredibly, the Texan
Former NFL player Shawne Merriman’s company sued the Vermont Teddy Bear Company over the trademark “Lights Out” last week.
Mr. Merriman’s use of the mark goes back to high school where he earned the nickname after knocking 4 players unconscious during the first half of a football 
game. Query whether such a nickname would arise
I am a loyal Sherwin-Williams customer…despite the company’s logo, which is widely considered one of the worst in corporate America.
Numerous articles have explored all that is wrong with the logo – namely that this logo first
-Martha Engel, Attorney
Up here in the North, we are big fans of the store that has it all – Target. In fact most Minnesotans will often joke that we cannot step foot in a Target store without spending at least $100 and walking out with items we never intended to purchase on
We’ve already written a bit here about the trend toward lower-case branding and visual identity:
Although I’d like to invite and actually welcome the far more professional wisdom of our trusted visual identity brethren and other learned branding and marketing types, until then, I’m guessing this trend has at least something to do with wanting to position
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
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
It’s hard to beat a logo that creates some double meaning, even one promoting a live performance of Cher in Sin City:
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Do you suppose this visual provides an intentional subliminal message to see her?
