21 Bizarre Presidential Brands and Trademarks
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Here at CI Sense, we like to keep an eye on how news stories impact the world of brands and trademarks. We recently used our Trademark Explorer to search for some new trademark filings associated with the American presidential candidates.
We hit quite a rich vein of bizarre filings. These are all legitimate applications to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Here are a few highlights, divided into actual products and odd slogans:
Weird Products
- Mo’Bama- Apparently to be used for a ‘natural cosmetic skin care powder’. Is that anything like Mo’butter?
- Barak? Oh Bummer! - To be used on bumper stickers and t-shirts. Clearly spelling is not their strong suit.
- Bearack Obama - Allegedly to become a future teddy bear. We googled for some samples, but only found this eager ursine Democrat and this creepy blog.
- Broccoli Obama - We wish we were kidding about this vegetable dish.
- Obama Llama - Yep, that’d be a stuffed toy. And, of course, the unrelated theme song.
- Obamanator - An ale from Denver’s Wynkoop Brewing Company. It’s already on the menu, apparently. Halfway through this campaign coverage you can hear about how they might have overdone the hop taste.
- The Sock Obama - A plush toy. Use your imagination.
- Palin Pink - Apparently going to be a lip gloss.
- Palin Not Stalin - To go on shirts and hats. Maybe they filed this one before they knew how Governor Palin’s name was pronounced?
Hillary Magic - An air freshener spray, of all things.- 69 Reasons Why I Miss Bill Clinton - A ’series of books’. One reason per book, maybe?
- Anyone But Hillary, 2008 - As you can imagine, there were a lot of variations on this for the bumper sticker and t-shirt crowd.
- The Clinton Countdown Watch - This one harkens back all the way to 1994, but we wanted to include it because of the amusing description: “watches with a cartoon of President Clinton on the face which count down the number of days he has remaining in office”.
Bad Slogans
- No Drama With Obama - That one ties for ‘most awful’ with ‘Obama is the Balm…Let’s Heal America’.
- McCain for Capitalism, Obama for Socialism - To be used in electric and LED signs.
- O.B.A.M.A. - Depending on which filing you like, this stands for “One Bonafide Achiever Making Change”, “Officially Bridging America Motivating Americans”" or “Our Best Chance for Managing America”.
- Obama Ain’t Your Momma - More bumper stickers here. It’s unclear which side you’d be supporting if you put this on your Subaru.
- Obama Bin Biden - Presumably this will be embossed on the back of Republican kaftans.
- What the Hill-ary Thinking, Don’t Drop a Ticking O-Bama on U.S. Soil - I wish we were kidding about that one.
- White Haired Dudes for McCain - There are other dudes who support McCain?
- McCainianc! - That’s a bit creepy, don’t you think?
You can see the reports we generated for all the candidates over on Scribd. To learn more about how we did this research, check out CI Sense.
Snacks & Comfort Foods: Distilling Competitive Intelligence From Trademarks
Monitoring your competitors’ trademark filings each week alerts you to new activity, but having a summary of their filings from the past six months to a year presents a big picture. It shows you the overall direction that your competitors or industry is headed. When individual trademarks are presented in context over time, the results can be luminous. Even if the product or brand has already been
launched, having recent trademark portfolios at your finger tips is an excellent Competitive Intelligence resource.
Below is an example of three companies in the Food industry along with their filings (sorted by date) from the past 6 months. Here is what we can learn from this:
- Just a quick glance gives you a quick update of what they’ve been up to.
- Often, closely related products will have the same or similar Filing Date.
- Some of the non-food related trademarks have been highlight just to show some standouts apart from the main industry.
- Although this is a snap-shot of the past six months, some of these products have yet to be announced.
Ten Years of Apple Trademark Filings
This reporting widget displays the prominence of sundry terms in Apple’s trademark application filings for the past ten years.
To create this widget, we parsed ten years worth of Apple’s trademark filings. We grabbed the descriptions for each trademark, removed the stop words and produced this tag cloud. The technical term in the trademark filing is actually ‘goods and services’, but essentially it’s a description of the trademark’s intent.
Drag the slider from left to right to see how the emphasis changes.
A few observations:
- Charming 90s terms like ‘CD-rom’ and ‘multimedia’ disappear immediately.
- ‘Audio’ and ‘video’ starts tiny, and grow big over time.
- ‘Handheld’ comes out of nowhere in 2005. Likewise, ‘mobile’ is huge by 2007.
Of course, as Apple fans know, they can be rather cagey when filing their trademarks. In 2006, they alledgedly filed a trademark for iPhone in Trinidad and Tobago using a front company called Ocean Telecom Services. And, of course, they like to file trademarks on the opening of MacWorld. Very cheeky.
This is just one of the many kinds of reports we can create at CI Sense. You may want to check out our free Trademark Explorer, which enables you to complete comprehensive trademark searches to automated watch lists, detailed reports, historical filings and portfolio analysis
Photo by Terry Johnston.
What’s Happening Here?
There’s a trademark party going on and you’re invited.
Well, it’s more like a gathering than a party. CI Sense knows trademarks don’t have a reputation for being exciting, but we’d like to show you that they can indeed be riveting.
CI Sense is a new trademark search service. But, unlike other services, we won’t merely alert you to new trademark filings. We’re doing something smarter. We present and analyze data in a clear way so that you can keep an eye on your competitors, find new competitors, identify emerging industry trends, etc.
From a comprehensive trademark search to automated watch lists, detailed reports, historical filings and portfolio analysis, CI Sense is your crystal ball into new brands and products headed for the market. Trademarks can provide a picture of what’s happening in your industry and even make it easier to concoct new product idea. Competitive intelligence made clear.
These are some examples of stories we’ll be covering on our blog:
How to incorporate trademark intel from CI Sense into an overall competitive intelligence strategy, why categorization is important for CI, solid overviews of key trademark topics, fun posts about strange trademarks, informative pieces about the world of trademarks, as well as monthly posts spotlighting the top five creative trademark filings that month.
We won’t be covering legal issues around trademarks, like conflicting marks, opposition cases, etc. For a legal lens on trademarks, check out The Trademark Blog or Likelihood of Confusion.
Now back to the second part of our introduction – we don’t want to do all the talking – we know how dull that can be at any party. We’re sincere about your place in this conversation: while we will be providing our thoughts about the world of trademarks, we’d love to hear from you and what you think about these posts. Are you learning anything new about competitive intelligence? What frustrates and excites you?
We are looking forward to some great discussions!
Summary of Filings - Selected Bev Ind.
This shows different companies by year and the category breakdown etc……
Just an example - actual data posted later
