Cadbury, a British confectionary company, established in Birmingham in 1824, is best known for its products the Dairy Milk, which is the bestselling product in Cadbury’s history.  Recently, Cadbury lost the five-year legal battle to trademark its chocolate bars purple. (see http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/04/cadbury-dairy-milk-purple-trademark-blocked) It leads us to reconsider the definition of distinctive brand image and the boundary of protection of intellectual property.

The exclusive use of brand color is not reasonable, because the brand image, as a whole, most of the time is not only a pure color block, but the permutation of different colors, patterns, logos, etc. To Cadbury, the color purple means a lot, which informs the world that it is a historic, somehow survived WWI, with certain links to Britain Loyal, and reliable quality. It is Cadbury’s value proposition. As Al Ries and Jack Trout stresses in their book, Positioning: The Battle for your Mind, it is really important to get into the mind of the consumers. From my perspective, it would be more effective if Cadbury consistently set the Pantone 2685C (the purple shade) over its wide range of products, so that consumers would spontaneously think of Cadbury chocolate bars whenever they see the purple color.