The Legal Paradox of too much Marketing Success

While startups struggle to gain some big of recognition, big companies get into trouble because of too much recognition sometimes. Resident contributor, wannapreneur, looks at such a conundrum. But such a problem is better than not having any marketing success, ain’t it?

In the world of branding, it is often that the ultimate goal that marketing wants to pull off is to turn their product brands into a ubiquitous household name. To some extent, a number of brands have managed to pull this off. Firms like Google, Photoshop and Xerox come to mind as they have been so well-known. These well known names have even become verbs with the meaning “to search online”, “to manipulate digitally” and “to make copies”. In fact, there is an online database filled with examples of such proprietary eponyms.

However, at the same time, the legal teams of these companies are freaking out as they see this as an improper usages of their trademarks – possibly detrimental to their brand name’s integrity? They are beginning to set guidelines for the proper usage of their brand names, like Adobe is doing for their Photoshop product. A blog post regarding Google’s trademark also appeared in the The Official Google Blog. From the legal perspective, the danger lies in that if the brand name becomes too generic and becomes accepted by people in such a manner, it would cause them to become generic names that are not owned by anyone. In order to avoid losing their multi-million dollar trademarks in this manner, companies have to show that they are actively trying to stop their trademarks from gradually becoming generic and some possible avenues are to run advertisement campaigns to stregthen their brand names or to urge the public at large and sometimes writers specifically to make use of trademarks properly.

But, there is some doubt as to the effectiveness of such guidelines on external parties. Within these companies, it would be sensible and very possible for them to set protective rules on how these elements of their corporate identity (like logos and taglines) present a coherent and consistent image of the company. A sensible first step which any company should take.

So, paradoxically, what is probably the greatest measure of marketing success for companies may in fact turn out to be a great legal problem for them.

[ Also : Digg – The Photoshop trademark must never be used as a Verb ]