----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerhard Fasol" <fasol@eurotechnology.com>
> 1. The WAP-forum has very detailed regulations how its trademarks
> (including "W@P" etc) may and may not be used.
> The information is here:
> http://www.wapforum.com/wap_logos/trademarkusage.htm
> Seems to have aspects of a brand...
I can hardly wait for WAP Cola.
If there's a point here, it's that it is pretty hard to control
consumer perceptions and use of terms -- as the tradename
holders of Kleenex and Xerox (re)discovered.
If the dot.com bubble showed that ordinary words (Pets,
Furniture) have little brand value, the experience of
consumer appropriation of tradenames into the
general vocabulary proves something else: that words
mean what native speakers decide they mean,
regardless of who claims to own them. If it looks like
a tradename, walks like a tradename, and quacks
like a tradename, it's a tradename, protests to
the contrary notwithstanding. And if people decide it's
just a verb or a noun, you're likewise out of luck.
But this is just the case where you have a single
"owner" claiming fealty without ambivalence.
Brand defense (or denial) is even trickier when the
nominal stakeholders have mixed motivations, as they
often do in an industrial consortium. The temptation for
individual member companies is to say "We *are*
<brand X>" when it concerns something good, but
"Oh, <brand X>, that's not us, really" whenever
certain odors can no longer be contained -- and to
move away from the collective brand identity to try
to establish something independently marketable.
One close parallel I can see to the WAP Forum in
recent history is Project Athena -- which yielded, most
notably, the X window system. By design, X did
not dictate what the desktop was to look like, and
various "brands" were attempted -- Motif, Open Look,
etc.
Well, the UNIX-triumphalist predictions of the early
90s look silly in retrospect -- none of those window
systems survives in any mass market consumer-recognizable
product. What we have is: Windows and Macintosh.
I.e., relative predictable consumer experience packages
tied to single companies with their own established
brand power: Microsoft and Apple, respectively.
One could draw another analogy: to Java. But I
think the jury is still out on that one.
It should be interesting to see how far this analogy
applies to the mobile phone as a platform.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
[ Need archives? How to unsubscribe? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Sun Aug 5 14:25:56 2001