Shelter in place has delivered attention to meal delivery, prepared food delivery, contactless delivery, not to mention DIY food products, so this Kraft television commercial led me to explore if there may be a trademark story in this brand:
Upon first seeing the ad for Kraft’s Just Crack an EGG breakfast
We’ve been down this road before, some themes intersect, and trademark value is filtered out:
The intersecting themes on tap for the day are: Zero, Branding, Trademarks, and Loss of Rights.
ZEROWATER is a perfectly suggestive, inherently distinctive, and federally-registered trademark with “incontestable” status as a source-identifier for “water filtering units
As you know, I enjoy telling trademark stories about soaps encountered on my various trips:
Lather® (brand) soap recently caught my eye — and the lens of my iPhone — while in Palo Alto.
Interestingly, the USPTO has treated the word as inherently distinctive, in Lather’s registrations.
In other words, not merely descriptive,
As I’ve been known to do long before now, this past weekend I found myself gazing intently, this time, into the front label and back copy on this S. Pellegrino sparkling natural mineral water bottle:
Putting aside the question of the shiny red star logo, which we already have bloviated about, here,
What do you think of when you hear the word Velveeta? Me too, childhood — complete with piping hot Campbell’s tomato soup — and perfectly melted grilled cheese sandwiches. Later in life, at least for me, came liquid gold and RO*TEL queso dip, usually on weekend game days. And, my daughter might add to
One of my passions is to find common and favorable ground between legal and marketing types.
One of the readings during week three of Seth Godin’s intensive altMBA workshop reminded me of a great example to illustrate how a valid marketing goal can align with strong legal protection.
An excerpt from Seth’s All Marketers are
We’ve written quite a bit over the years about the Spectrum of Distinctiveness for trademarks, and the all-important difference between suggestive marks and merely descriptive ones, with only the former being allowed immediate rights based on first use.
Creativity is what separates the power of suggestion from the weakness and limbo of descriptiveness.
We had some great questions from the audience during the Mastering U.S. Trademark Registration Practice seminar in Minneapolis a few weeks ago. During the session on genericness, someone asked about MyPillow, expressing amazement that it could be federally-registered.
Having now seen the MyPillow television advertisement probably a dozen times since then, I’ve finally gotten
You know that feeling when you’ve nearly crossed the finish line? You have done the work, put in the time, and the only step left is to run through the tape.
There can be similar moments with trademark applications, too. Admittedly, it may not be as exciting for other people, but I certainly enjoy it.
Seeing these on the store shelf this weekend reminded me that we are still anxiously awaiting the USPTO’s decision from the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) as to whether the words “pretzel crisps” will be found generic for “pretzel crackers” –basically, a public domain category or class of goods term, in the