Week 8: Aggressive Branding, or Just Aggressive?

 Branding is the cornerstone of any company: good branding creates a relationship with the customer and memorable touchstones, bad branding is forgettable at best. It makes sense that corporations would want to protect their branding as much as possible. Apple in particular is notable for being on the offensive when it comes to possible infringements on their visual territory. However, in an article from the New York Times on March 11 - Apps and Oranges: Behind Apple's "Bullying" on Trademarks - describes how Apple has filed 215 suits against brands using the word "apple," the image of an apple, or other stemmed fruits "between 2019 and last year [...] according to the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit watchdog. That’s more than the estimated 136 trademark oppositions that Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google collectively filed in the same period, the group said."

In an ideal world, the system in place rewards strong branding and prohibits bad actors from jumping on whatever the biggest brand is and replacing a single letter or changing the color of the logo. The ability to issue suits on these grounds speaks to the history. However, it seems as though Apple may be careening towards a new issue, one where all the small brands with only the most thin of connecting threads that have been sued, take up arms against the conglomerate and demand their abuse of the system stop. As Mac and Browning recount, "[Apple's] quarries have included an Indian food blog, the Energy Department, a Wisconsin public school district and Mattel, which makes the hit card game Apples to Apples. Apple also objected to an orange logo used by a curbside pickup start-up named Citrus. Last year, it settled a dispute with a meal planning app called Prepear after the app’s creator agreed to change a leaf on its pear logo to make it look less like Apple’s." Even with a basic knowledge of the world of marketing, this list is the kitchen sink - how would a Wisconsin school district be confused with a tech giant at all? Even if they had the exact same branding, no matter how you slice it, a school district will never be able to infringe on the image of Apple.

But maybe that's what Apple is trying to do: they're already one of the oligarchs of American culture and economy, and they're trying to set legal precedents to remove the protections of smaller businesses by bullying them into submission, threatening with massive lawsuits. It can and will lead to the homogenization of the American market, and all the diversity that is supposed to spring up under a capitalist system will be gone. Are we ready for our new fruit overlords?