You’re well aware of the fact that we have a burning desire for great brands and trademarks.
Outside Whole Foods last evening, with snow falling, I found a beautiful display of firewood:
A smile came to my face as I read the SnuggleWood brand name for this kiln-dried firewood.
We’ve written a lot about the
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,
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
For those of you who have been with us since the beginning of this wonderful collaboration of legal and marketing types, known as DuetsBlog, you also know we have a mascot dubbed Duey — he’s depicted in the squirrel graphic at the top of this page. Here is his story, as told by Aaron
Let’s call it the Family Feud test of trademark suggestiveness . . . . 
We’ve written a lot here about the all-important Spectrum of Distinctiveness, a key tool for those who name products and services, and for those who hope their selected names can be ownable as trademarks, upon their first use in commerce.
Recently I happened upon an interesting non-traditional, non-verbal, federally-registered trademark that is sure to inspire multiple naming/branding/design posts for me down the road, and I’m anticipating they’ll be so easy to write, I’ll probably do them while I sleep:
So, given that introduction, any guesses as to the brand identified by this floating
On this Valentine’s Day, after enduring weeks of the same endless running of national retail jewelry chain advertising, leading up to this annually celebrated day of love and affection, I thought it might be fitting to try a few retail jewelry store taglines on for size and examine — at least from a trademark perspective — their protect-ability and likely placement on
–Susan Perera, Attorney
It’s that time of year again, when retail stores featuring ghosts, goblins, and all things spooky begin to appear. This year multiple parties went trick or treating at the USPTO to register their trademarks for Halloween retail store services, and apparently they weren’t all reading Steve’s post from earlier this year regarding
On a recent pilgrimage to my home town to visit the University of Iowa and to see the Hawkeyes play football again in hallowed Kinnick Stadium, I discovered that a rather rudimentary and perhaps impolite (or potty mouth), yet passionate (sorry Nancy) branding technique, is alive and kicking in Iowa City. I also learned what now appears to go hand-in-hand (or, perhaps leg-in-hands as opposed to a single hand) with Hawkeye football games, at least those played on their home turf:
Somehow the static sign doesn’t do justice to the in-person-experience, so try the YouTube video.
Once again, I’m reminded of Anthony Shore’s succinct naming insight:
There was a time when a simple, honest name was good enough.
Anthony, it appears those times are alive and well (or at least kicking) in the middle of the heartland.
Having said that, I’m also reminded of Liz Goodgold’s caution over "Potty Mouth Marketing: Six Reasons Why Vulgar Language is the Curse of Your Brand".
Trademark Office insights below the jump.Continue Reading Primitive & Impolite, But Non-Vulgar Trademark & Naming Technique?