In the world of marketing, consumers are constantly exposed to and offered a wide range of products offered by different companies who are fighting capture the the largest portion of their targeted market. Thus, companies are constantly trying to strand out amongst their competitors, create a niche for themselves and differentiate their brand. And how do they do this? One growingly popular strategy of colour association. Visual information is very often related to colour and this explains why consciously or unconsciously, we associate distinctive colours to certain products. For example green is associated with Starbucks, red is associated to Coca Cola, yellow and blue is associated to IKEA and so on. Of course, there are not enough colours in the world for each company to claim its own colour association and so, firms are beginning to turn to the legal system to claim their rights to a colour.

A great example of another company that has can be found on the Brand Channel’s blog post on how Cadbury, the well known British chocolate company has recently successfully registered purple (Pantone 2865c to be specific) as their trademark colour (on chocolate products only). Though Cadbury strongly believed in the colour as a powerful identification of their brand, it was definitely a legal struggle with competitors such as Nestle retaliating against this patent.

This seven year long fight Cadbury has put up was for good reason as it has essentially protected their brand image. As Christopher Wadlow, Ph.D. proposes in his book, The Law of Passing-off: Unfair Competition by Misrepresentation, “colours operate as powerful stimulants of memory, identification and loyalty” (2004). In light of this, Cadbury’s purpose is to take advantage of this powerful stimulate and claim the colour as officially theirs in the market. Their main concern was to ensure that it can be easily distinguished even by children too young to read. In doing so, they are eliminating having consumers mistakingly pick up the “fake” Cadbury chocolate bar wrapped in purple due to products of strikingly similar packaging in terms of colour, logo and text being shelved on the same shelf.

Cadbury is only one of the few companies that has jumped on the colour patenting bandwagon. Leading brands of the colour trademarking include Tiffany & Co.’s colour Tiffany Blue and T-Mobile’s colour magenta. While gaining the rights to a colour still remains to be a painfully long and difficult process, companies are realizing the importance of claiming their colour in order to protect their brand image.