Brand Guidelines and Trademark Infringement
At Savaray, we’re not only mobile performance specialists, we’re able to identify a wide range of issues from accessibility compliance, project management, web/mobile performance to legal concerns. One of the legal areas we’ll look at in further detail is the adherence to brand guidelines.
Most large corporations have a set of brand guidelines detailing how their trademark(s)/logo(s) may be used. Often there are entire departments or teams dedicated to Branding and drafting guidelines on brand usage. From the tiniest of margins to the largest variations in colours, typefaces and shapes, these guidelines detail specifically how a brand can and cannot be used. Below is an example from a selection of Brand Guidelines.
Twitter is very particular about the colour their bird can be, it’s either white or blue, specifically HEX #1DA1F2. Facebook is a little more lenient on the colours, allowing their specific white, grey, black or blue variations but are strict on shape. Their “f” logo cannot be placed in a circle or on its own, it must be in their rounded square and YouTube only allows their variations of red, white or nearly black. As you can see corporations take branding quite seriously, often spending into the millions to brand/rebrand themselves.
How are these trademarks being used around the web?
Let’s start with one of Britain’s leading energy suppliers, British Gas.
The Twitter logo used by British Gas is from around 2010, but it was updated to its current format around 2012, making this logo over 7 years out of date. The colours are definitely not Twitter’s blue HEX #1DA1F2. The same is true for the out of date and miscoloured YouTube logo and the infringing Facebook icon surrounded by a circle with incorrect colours too. But are they the only ones, lets take a look at global pharmaceutical company, GSK and another household name, Samsung.
Nobody seems to be able to get the Facebook logo right, and GSK thinks its okay to grayscale everyone’s trademarks. It’s not just social media icons either, take a look at how Virgin Media portrays the Sky News Channel on their website.
The Sky News logo was redesigned over a year ago but Virgin Media continue to use out of date graphics. Why do these companies, who themselves often have strict brand guidelines, feel its okay to misuse other corporate trademarks? The excuse we often hear is that the design work was outsourced to an agency who provided incorrect assets. To which we’ll ask, who signed off, who did the due diligence? You can’t blame everything on outsourced work. At times it’s the internal design team who feel using the correct logos/social media icons would detract from their web page designs. In the best-case scenario, this is just disrespectful to the designers whose logos are being misused. In the worst case, it could result in a trademark infringement lawsuit; as has been the case with Hasbro misusing fonts or Greenpeace altering the Esso logo and many others. Most intellectual property lawsuits are settled out of court so we don’t get to hear about them, but you should do your best to ensure you don’t fall foul of misusing other corporate trademarks and always follow brand guidelines.
More?
Of course there’s more to know, whilst scrolling through the Virgin Media web page we were hit by a barrage of popups, resulting in the page looking like the image shown below.
There are 4 popups on this page, it looks like A/B testing gone wrong, we’re not sure the Virgin Media design team would be too happy with this page. We might look into this in a future article, in the meantime if you liked what you read please share and if you need help we’re only an email away info(@)savaray.com.
All images depicting the British Gas, GSK, Samsung and Virgin Media websites, and images depicting brand guidelines of YouTube, British Airways, Canon, Facebook and Twitter are not intended to infringe any copyright and are used under fair dealing for criticism and review.
Note: The brief analysis of the mobile pages we’re discussing was carried out on the 18th of February 2019 and depicts issues with the websites at that point in time. As software is often updated regularly, if you’re reading this a day, a week or a month after this date, hopefully the issues described would already have been addressed.
Filed Under: Legal
Related Tags: brand guidelines,british gas,gsk,samsung,virgin media
