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By
Mr. Naseem Javed
Posted Mar 8th, 2005
Contrary
to branding beliefs, customers don't really care
and are completely oblivious about soaking of
a total image of a corporation in a very specific
color.
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ORANGE
Mobility, a British mobile phone company of France Telecom,
is one of the largest telephone players in Europe. Just
to make their point, as a gimmick, painted an entire
town in England orange.
Now,
Orange mobility, fully drenched in the color orange,
is asking courts to disallow Easymobile, a new mobility
service the use of the color orange. This is a division
of Easygroup and they too have been soaked in orange
for over a decade as a part of their preferred color.
The founder of Easyjet, a high profile entrepreneur
Haji-Ioannou, of Easygroup, will fight back, claiming
his corporate right to use the color orange as a branding
strategy. Is this all easy for the easy fellows or tough
to win? Now a colorful fight breaks out while the arguments
all end up in a punch bowl.
Can
the great teams of lawyers claim such exclusive rights
and attempt to convince the courts? Yes. But in reality
you can't own the exclusive global rights to a specific
color. In the long run and at the end of the rainbow,
a single corporation can't own trademark rights to a
single color, just like a single number or a single
letter of the alphabet. Imagine if only Ford was allowed
to have blue painted cars. "Blue is mine and nobody
would dare to use it". Or if the number seven exclusively
belonged to Walt Disney, that's it. Now there is nothing
between 6 and 8" Similarly are the alphabets, "W" is
only for Westinghouse? Come let's join the fight.
Think
of blue and what comes to mind is a blue ocean. A blue
sky? Sometimes Big Blue, which is IBM. Once they truly
acquired a secondary meaning and a legendary position
of being recognized as such. After all it was a great
army in blue suits pushing forward the towering blue
mainframe computers. This is a very small chapter in
long history of branding where this corporation was
recognized by a single color. Today blue is the most
common color used in corporate business and liberally
used by all types of technology companies. This is why
DELL Computer's logo and many thousands of other computers
related businesses are all in blue. IBM never went to
court on this issue.
This
fight has two issues; one, the use of the word, orange
and two, the use of the color of the same fruit. The
tie of the two together makes a unique combination,
but not a guarantee for a global restriction to use
the orange color by anybody else in telephony. Orange
Mobility will have a nightmare if they decided to go
global. They know it well. Like a bank called Tomato
in Japan, also using the word along with a designated
red color. But can Tomato bank stop all banks in Japan
from using the color red? No. The reasons this issue
is going to court are two. One, an overly fruity branding
and the other, the overly-zealous legal wits.
"Fatal
indigestion for elephants!"
The
odd origin of the word 'Orange' comes from "naga ranga"
in Sanskrit. According to a Seventh Century B.C. incident,
recorded in the etymological journal. Apparently, one
day an elephant was passing through the forest, when
he found a tree unknown to him in a clearing, bowed
downward by its weight of beautiful, tempting oranges;
as a result, the elephant ate so many that he burst.
Many years later a man stumbled upon the scene and noticed
the fossilized remains of the elephant with many orange
trees growing from what had been its stomach. The man
then exclaimed, "Amazing! What a naga ranga (fatal indigestion
for elephants)!" Now how about some Le Duck-AlOrange
The
colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky.
Decades
ago, in the age of technological scarcity, to be identified
by a specific color or even called by that name were
considered a great Corporate Image coup. Today, it has
no value, while big corporate identity firms have clearly
run out of unique, powerful names, they are now desperately
trying to support weaker and poor names with a specific
color theme as a calling device to identify a corporation.
Corporate Identity, by a single unique color, that is.
With red, blue and yellow as primary colors how far
can you go in reminding customers to differentiate among
100 million brands. Will "Pink Magenta" or "Dark Cherry
Black" be the new highly exclusive and protected corporate
colors? In this scenario courts will be swamped over
the slight change in a shade or a tint. May be great
for a short publicity stunt and some huge legal cost
but practical no.
Use
of colors is our right, claiming exclusivity is dumb.
"What
Can BROWN Do For You Today"? Brown is a new calling
device for UPS, the United Parcel Service,. 'BROWN makes
me happy' Really? Recently, Pepsi introduced a blue
colored soft drink in a Pepsi bottle called Pepsi Blue.
Maybe as a counter attack to Vanilla Coke, a dark colored
coke with vanilla flavor. Unfortunately to some, Pepsi
Blue looks more like Windex or 2000 Flushes. The marketing
of blue fluids has often been associated with sanitation
products, even when it comes to mouthwashes, like Clorox
and Listerine in Blue. There are also blue, green and
purple Ketchup these days. So what's next?
Yellow
is considered for the soft at heart and the timid, but
then there are the useful YELLOW PAGES. Also YELLOW
FREIGHT, a gigantic freight company of strong men on
the super highways. Call YELLOW, we're so mellow. Who
knows?
Green
thoughts are often for money, grass and vegetables.
Sometimes, for The GHOSTBUSTERS or THE GREEN PARTY,
which is for the environment, and flushed with green
money. H&R Block, the tax preparing giant, is now clinging
to a green block as their image and their exclusive
color. Perhaps they want be recognized as a Green Bloch
[sic]. Henry Bloch, correctly picked the name of his
company as H&R Block to avoid spelling and pronunciation
problems, when appeared as a spokesperson with his correct
name, caused confusion and to correct the whole thing
he simply changed his own name to Block. Well done,
consumer thanks you for this easy spelling of Block,
Mr. Bloch.
The
use of color as a name or to identify a corporation
is far too stretched. The customer, at large, is somewhat
color blind to these branding tactics. It's already
recovering from the awkward, dumb, and at times, obscene
names from the wild branding era of the last dot.com
bubble. PurpleFrog; PurpleCow; PurpleDog; PurpleRhino;
all the way to BlueFrog, BlueCow, BlueDog; BlueRhino,
etc. etc. These poor animals were subjected to so much
verbal abuse and named in just about every color of
the rainbow, almost creating possible strikes at local
zoo.
The
customer cannot be motivated to a branding surge by
coming across a specific color. Imagine, every time
you come in contact with the color brown, wouldn't you
prefer to think of a chocolate bar, rather than calling
UPS or hugging one of their delivery guys on the road.
Every time you see green do you really think of money,
IRS or just grass?
If
naming corporations by color is really that important,
then perhaps a lot of corporations should simply be
called RED; red in embarrassment, blushing or simply
for bleeding too much red ink. PINK, if cleared by SEC.
and ROSEY, if on the rebound.
Logos
and big color schemes are the things of the past yet
they are more used for packaging designs; unfortunately
colors are only few and part of our daily life. Today
in this e-commerce age where everyone is forced to TYPE
and to remember the names with absolute correct spellings,
big branding campaigns only hurting themselves with
their old fashioned, one-side painted colorful advice.
They must all re-converge and re-group and re-align
their thinking to cope with this name driven economy.
Best
for now, leave the pretty colors of the rainbows in
the sky, alone.
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Mr.
Naseem Javed is the author of Naming for Power,
and is recognized as a world authority on global name
identities and domain issues. He introduced The Laws
of Corporate Naming in the 80s and is the founder
of ABC Namebank, a naming consultancy he established
in Toronto, a quarter century ago. Mr. Javed lectures
and conduct executive workshops on global corporate
image and name identity issues. For more information,
contact Mr. Javed at: ask@njabc.com. www.abcnamebank.com
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