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posted by cmn32480 on Monday August 28 2017, @03:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the potty-training-targets dept.

From ArsTechnica

General Mills argued that it deserved to be awarded the trademark status because "consumers have come to identify the color yellow" on boxes of oats cereal with "the Cheerios brand." It has been marketed in yellow packaging since 1945, with billions in sales.

The board noted that "there is no doubt that a single color applied to a product or its packaging may function as a trademark and be entitled to registration under the Trademark Act." But that's only if those colors have become "inherently distinctive" in the eyes of consumers. Some of those examples include UPS "Brown;" T-Mobile "Magenta;" Target "Red;" John Deere "Green & Yellow;" and Home Depot "Orange." It goes without saying that anybody can still use those colors predominately in their marketing, but not direct competitors.

Regarding the box of Cheerios, however, the court ruled that consumers don't necessarily associate the yellow box of cereal with Cheerios, despite General Mills' assertion to the contrary. Consumers are confronted with a multitude of yellow boxes of oats cereal, the appeal board noted. By comparison, T-Mobile has only a handful of competitors, and none of them uses the magenta color as a distinctive mark, the appeal board said.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Zinho on Monday August 28 2017, @02:14PM (2 children)

    by Zinho (759) on Monday August 28 2017, @02:14PM (#560241)

    What the heck does gender have to do with this? Are you fishing for a particular response by throwing this in? :)

    Obligatory XKCD link. [xkcd.com]

    Funny thing is, the XKCD color survey kinda shows that women think of colors mostly in the same terms as men - by which I mean words used to describe them.

    I think the "women especially" stereotype comes from the fact that many more words are used to market colors to women than are used to market colors to men. You're much more likely to see a green article described as "lime", "clover", or "seafoam" when being sold to a woman than when sold to a man. There's probably a bunch of psychology associated with this, boiling down to "men don't care" and "women respond to it".

    It's possible that trademark law starts creeping in here, as it's probably easier to get trademark protection on a lipstick formula when it's marketed as "Maybelline (R) Sweet Maraschino (TM) Lipstick". Also, with 50 different red lipsticks the vendor has to do something to differentiate products in their own line. The irony for me is that among the women I know the go-to technique for finding their preferred color again isn't to look for the fancy color name; instead, they remember the brand and the associated number (which was probably assigned serially by order of formulation, they don't group nicely by color when sorted by number). The marketers would probably do just as well to have a gamut of nice colors with easy to read numbers as the product name.

    --
    "Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by cmdrklarg on Monday August 28 2017, @07:23PM

    by cmdrklarg (5048) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 28 2017, @07:23PM (#560422)

    I think the "women especially" stereotype comes from the fact that many more words are used to market colors to women than are used to market colors to men. You're much more likely to see a green article described as "lime", "clover", or "seafoam" when being sold to a woman than when sold to a man. There's probably a bunch of psychology associated with this, boiling down to "men don't care" and "women respond to it".

    Back in college I was taking a German language class. During an in-class exercise the instructor pointed at this girl's sweater and asked her (in German) "What color is your sweater?" The expected answer was "rot" (red).

    She then proceeded to hem and haw, "Well, it's kind of a crimson..."

    The instructor's exasperated rant was just priceless.

    --
    The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 28 2017, @11:28PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 28 2017, @11:28PM (#560581) Journal

    "Some were obviously using scripts; based on the filter’s certainty, the #1 spammer in the database was someone who named 2,400 colors—all with the same racial slur."

    So, our own Ethanol Fueled participated in the survey? Interesting. Thanks for the link, I've never seen that one!