reveries.com :: marketing insights + ideas

Just how hard it can be to win a trademark for a product design came clear when Apple finally got a mark for its iPod design, report David Orozco and James Conley in the Wall Street Journal (5/12/08). Apple’s initial application was summarily rejected by the case examiner at the Patent and Trademark Office as “too broad.” That was in 2006 and Apple had simply submitted a drawing of the iPod and “requested a legal description of the trademark that was so broad it could be taken to refer to any media player.” However, in rejecting the application, the case examiner also offered some advice, such as that Apple should cite “specific features being claimed, e.g., the concentric circle design, etc.”

The examiner also said Apple had to provide evidence of an “association in consumer’s minds between the product design and Apple,” as well as document how much money the company had spent on building the association. Obviously, Apple had done a lot of things right. First, it had given its product a unique name and trademarked it. Second, it had “a history of unique product designs,” helping Apple to “make the case that consumers identify the unique design exclusively with the company.” Third, it invested heavily in advertising to “build the desired association in consumers’ minds by highlighting the product attribute, the company name and little or nothing else.”

Fourth, Apple applied for a trademark “for a two-dimensional symbol representing the device and another for a trademark to be used on co-branded products” (example here). That second trademark was especially clever because the symbol is licensed to third-party makers of iPod accessories, meaning, in effect, that “these companies are paying Apple to build the association between the iPod shape and Apple.” Finally, Apple deliberately initially applied for a very broad trademark to “tease out what the examiner (was) looking for without making the trademark claim any narrower than is required.” The best part is, Apple’s trademark on the iPod shape “can remain in force potentially forever … unlike more commonly used utility and design patents” which “expire after a set number of years.” ~ Tim Manners, editor

Martin Scorcese was really disappointed when he found out that the guy who used to design covers for Esquire magazine was an adman, reports Charles McGrath in the New York Times (4/27/08). That guy was George Lois, who responds that he never saw much difference between creating an ad and creating a magazine cover. “I’ve always been about the big idea,” says George. “I never had any trouble going into a new area. It’s all a matter of creativity.” That creativity included “the early Xerox commercials showing a chimpanzee deftly operating a photocopier,” as well as the “Think Small” ads for Volkswagen and the “I want my MTV” campaign.

But George Lois is probably even better known for the 92 covers he created for Esquire magazine between 1962 and 1972. These include Richard Nixon “having lipstick applied, L.B.J. holding a Hubert Humphrey dummy, Andy Warhol drowning in a Campbell’s soup can, Muhammed Ali posing as St. Sebastian and a grinning Lt. William Calley, the leader of the massacre at MyLai, with four Vietnamese children.” One cover that generated a costly kind of controversy showed “Sonny Liston wearing a Santa Hat.” That one was too much for “white America” at the time (1963), and it cost Esquire “$750,000 in dropped advertising” (covers here).

Byron Dobell, who was Esquire’s managing editor during the George Lois decade, says that the covers were, in fact, great advertisements for Esquire’s brand of journalism. Like today’s magazine covers, they traded on celebrity appeal, but unlike today they “were virtually textless. They achieved their effect by communicating a single idea through an image.” Perhaps most important, the covers were not determined by committee — it was just George Lois working directly with Harold Hayes, the editor. As George put it: “You need to get one guy who understands the culture, who likes comic strips, goes to the ballet, visits the Metropolitan Museum.” A retrospective of his Esquire covers is now on display at the Museum of Modern Art. ~ Tim Manners, editor

Karen Washington may be from Harlem, but she says she’s always known one thing about herself — that she wanted to be a farmer, reports Tracie McMillan in the New York Times (5/7/08). “When I was a little kid I used to watch the farm report,” says Karen. She began realizing her dream in 1985, when, as a single mom, she moved from Harlem to the South Bronx and started to grow her own vegetables, organically — for her neighbors as well as for herself. Before long she also helped “turn a vacant lot on her block” into a garden, and began helping “defend local gardens from developers.” Karen’s activism resulted in the formation of a coalition, La Familia Verde, which now runs a farm stand and is looking into starting a full-blown farmer’s market.

“It’s not about making money,” says Karen. “We’re selling so that people in our neighborhood have good quality. There’s no Whole Foods in my neighborhood.” As ostensibly unlikely as Karen’s story sounds, it is far from unique: “This urban agriculture movement has grown even more vigorously elsewhere. Hundreds of farmers are at work in Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland and other areas that, like East New York, have low-income residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of fresh produce, and available, undeveloped land.” The crops often taken on an ethnic flair.

Denniston Wilks, who gew up in rural Jamaica (the island) but now lives in Brooklyn, raises sugar cane, yams, “bitter melons like those from the West Indies” and cilantro. He’s been at it since 1990, starting in his backyard but now farming, along with neighbors, in a vacant city lot. Because the soil tested for lead, Denniston and his neighbors “built raised beds of compost.” It’s all organic — they planted marigolds and put up fences to deter pests of all kinds, and import ZooDoo for fertilizer from the Bronx Zoo. “The city has been good to us,” says Denniston’s wife, Marlene. “All the property we work on, it’s city property.” Karen Washington, meanwhile, has now set her sights on opening an urban farm school, where she says she hopes kids will learn that tomatoes don’t actually originate from supermarkets. ~ Tim Manners, editor

Susanne M. Jaeggi has co-authored a paper that says it is possible to train people to increase their brainpower, reports Nicholas Bakalar in The New York Times (4/29/08). Susanne is a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Michigan who conducted a test showing that so-called “fluid intelligence” — the kind of intelligence considered to be innate and that can’t be taught — can, in fact, be improved upon with practice. Since fluid intelligence is basically the ability to “solve new problems without having any relevant previous experience,” training centers on “working memory — the kind that allows memorization of a telephone number just long enough to dial it.”

According to Susanne and her research team, this works because working memory is “closely related” to fluid intelligence, basically relying “on the same brain circuitry.” So, after measuring their research subjects for fluid intelligence, the researchers “trained each in a complicated memory task, an elaborate variation on Concentration, the child’s card game, in which they memorized simultaneously presented auditory and visual stimuli that had to recall later.” A total of four groups participated for a half-hour “for “8, 12, 17 and 19 days, respectively,” with the level of difficultly continuously adjusted based on each individual’s success rate.

Results were compared with a control group that did not receive the training, to ensure that the test participants weren’t just getting better at taking the test. While the control group did, in fact, improve, the trained groups improved far more. In addition, those who trained longer, improved more — regardless of how weak or strong their fluid intelligence was prior to the training. According to the study (link here) the training helped strengthen the ability to solve new problems, specifically “ignoring irrelevant items, monitoring ongoing performance, managing two tasks simultaneously and connecting related items to one another in space and time.” ~ Tim Manners, editor

It was 30 years ago May 3rd that Gary Thuerk sent the first known unsolicited bulk e-mail message, reports Ben Worthen in the Wall Street Journal (5/6/08). The message was an invitation to an open house event for a new computer “that he sent to 400 of the 2,600 or so people who had email accounts at the time” on the Arpanet, the predecessor to the Internet. Gary’s little email innovation was a success, leading to about $12 million in sales, he figures.

However, he also came under fire, because at the time there was an “unwritten rule” not to “use the Arpanet to sell things.” Gary says he didn’t think he had done anything wrong since technically the email was an invitation, not a direct sales pitch. But someone from the Department of Defense called him and told him never to send another email like that again, and Gary didn’t. His feat does, however, maintain a place “in the Guinness Book of World Records, and he does promotional work for anti-spam companies from time to time.”

And although he says he gets mixed reactions from people — some are excited when they learn of his claim to fame/infamy, while others “want to beat him up on the spot” — he thinks he doesn’t deserve any blame. “If the airline loses your luggage do you blame the Wright Brothers?” he asks. As for his own relationship with his innovation, he doesn’t have one. Gary says when he began receiving a flood of emails he simply changed his email address and “stopped filling out forms online.” He says he only gives out his phone number. ~ Tim Manners, editor