Packaging is a major factor of marketing mix and it plays an important role while customers make decisions. Especially for chocolate bars 🙂

Cadbury, UK’s top chocolate company was founded almost 200 years ago and it uses a purple color for packaging for about 100 years. The eye catching purple color is a big component of Cadbury’s brand identity, since customers link the color purple directly to Cadbury products. This is why, Cadbury trademarked the purple color in 2008 and by doing this it prevented Nestle or any other companies to use that purple color for their packaging. However, Nestle appealed against the trademarking of purple and the ruling last year. It took a year for the court to make the decision. Last week Nestle won the appeal. Now, not only Nestle but any competitor company can use Cadbury’s purple for wrapping their products.

This is a fail for Cadbury, however it has been more than a hundred years that they use that color for every single chocolate they produce. Personally, I believe that it does not matter if other companies use that bright purple color. Many people will still know that bright purple color is Cadbury’s color.

Sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24401249

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-04/cadbury-s-purple-reign-ended-by-u-k-court-in-nestle-appeal.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/9579930/Cadbury-defeats-Nestle-in-battle-for-purple-wrapper.html