Persuasion Through Advertising: Creating Product Recognition-- Trademarks

By Author: Adela
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A trademark identifies a company's product. A trademark is a symbol--sometimes verbal, sometimes visual, sometimes both--that tells the consumer who makes the product. Trademarks do not have to be words found in the language, although once a trademark has been widely advertised, it may find its way into the dictionary. Exxon and Xerox are words created specifically to serve as trademarks.

Sometimes advertisers are so successful in identifying the trademark with the product that the trademark becomes a common equivalent for the product. Cellophane, aspirin, escalator, trampoline, nylon, linoleum, and thermos were once trademarks held by individual companies. Because the Links Of London Bracelets manufacturers of these products and their advertisers did not protect these names adequately, the trademarks slipped into the public vocabulary and the public domain. To protect a trademark, manufacturers insist that it be used with the term for the generic product. So, for example, ads do not promote Kleenex but Kleenex tissues. In addition, the trademark is ...
... always capitalized.

A product may also be identified by a trade character who personifies the product's important characteristics. Often the trade character speaks for the product and functions visually as a substitute for the product: the Pillsbury Doughboy, for example, personifies and speaks for Pillsbury biscuits. The Doughboy resembles the biscuits--he's white in color, responds to touch by bouncing back (as freshly baked biscuits do), and is immaculately clean (he wears a white baker's hat). He's called Poppin' Fresh, suggesting that the biscuits rise, bake quickly, and taste fresh.

The vigilance with which companies protect their trademarks was evident in summer 1995, when the Hormel Foods Corporation, the producer of the pork-based luncheon meat Spam, sued the makers of the movie Muppet Treasure Island over the presence in the film of an evil boar named "Spa am." "Hormel officials," reported the New York Times, "also objected in the lawsuit to plans by the movie makers to feature the Spa'am character in Happy Meals at McDonald's restaurant and on boxes of Cheerios cereal boxes."1
Some trade characters are a clear and simple extension of the name of the company. The greyhound of Greyhound buses symbolizes the company's name and at the same time suggests that the buses are fast, sleek, and efficient.

In March 1995, the Supreme Court held that a color, such as the pink of fiberglass insulation or the blue identified with a sugar substitute, can have trademark protection. Before that ruling, companies could obtain federal protection only for "words, names, symbols, or devices" that distinguish Links Of London Charms their products. More than fifty companies claimed trademarked colors. At issue in the court case was whether Qualitex Company, which had trademark protection for its gold-green Sun Glow pads used in dry cleaning, could claim unfair competition from the Jacobson Products Company, which had begun selling a competing pad in green-gold. Color is among the characteristics consistently associated with products. For example, we recognize Campbell soups in part by the use of red and white on the can, and we identify Dr. Pepper in part by its maroon labels.