Are Fan Cans a Trademark Infringement?
Some colleges around the country are not cheering for Bud Light’s latest, some may call it brilliant, marketing campaign.
Using some 27 combinations, the cans carry the colors of various football teams throughout the nation. The Bud Light marketing campaign urges football fans to “show your true colors ” on game day.
Neither the name of the team nor its logo is displayed and the teams have no connection to the Bud Light campaign.
Nonetheless some colleges are complaining.
The Wall Street Journal reports that 25 colleges have formally asked Anheuser-Busch, brewer of Bud Light, to drop the campaign near their campuses, The University of Michigan demanded that Anheuser-Busch not sell the “maize and blue cans in the state,” the Journal reported. The University of Colorado, Oklahoma State University, Texas A&M University and Boston College have also told the company to stop distribution near their campuses, citing trademark issues and concern about student alcohol use, the newspaper said.
But is this a trademark or trade dress issue? Neither the team name nor its logo are on the cans, merely colors. So Bud Light could produce Navy Blue and Gold/Yellow cans and they could sell them around Navy, Notre Dame, West Virginia and Michigan just to name a few. That fact alone weakens any claim that a color combination on a can is infringing the trademark or trade dress of a particular school.
I think the trademark infringement threat was dead on arrival. Bottom line is Bud Light has brilliant marketers that have appealed to the rabid fans’ obsession with anything containing their school’s colors.
Go Navy!
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | marketing, trade dress, trademark infringement
