TRADE MARKS
What trade marks in use today, will be around half a century from now?
Judging by the accelerated rate of buy-outs, mergers, take-overs and consolidations taking place rapidly now, it may well be that only a handful of well-known trade mark symbols will be extant.
With just about every week that passes we fnd a major tobacco company taking over another firm in that rather shaky business field. Banks seems to be most interested in buying other banks to become, usually,the “second largest” something or other in a complex field. Every time they do this or one grocery chain buys another – they eliminate a well-known logo marking their firm as being distinct from all others.
You have, no doubt, had your favorites. Mine include the Morton's Salt girl walking along through the rain with salt spilling from a carton she carries. She has changed considerably over the years to keep up with the times, but the logo idea is still intact.
Others have changed, too, but usually it has been done gradually and we have accepted the modification without even realizing they had been replaced.
One of the most clever transformations was one worked at the beginning of World War II. At that time most of us wrote with a yellow, wooden pencil - #2 lead - if we could get it, which bore the emblem of an ornate oriental imperial crown and the imprinted word name “Mikado”. After Pearl Harbor, that name had to go, of course, and, without even a ripple of publicity calling attention to the change, the manufacturer went with a more subdued royal crown in exactly the same position and the word “Mikado” gave way to the Spanish word “Mirado”. In many cases, people who still write with that make of pencil today have not yet realized it once shifted so adeptly under stress of historical change.
Others I recall from the early part of the past century: The attentive RCA dog, forever listening so intently, the Mack Truck Bull Dog - tough as they come, The bearded Smith Brothers on their cough drops packets, the distinctive shape of the Chevrolet sign and many others which pop into my mind's “eye” every now and then. Others have been either forgotten or combined.
I worked, at one time, with a young man in radio broadcasting who change cars quite often. Each time he changed cars he modified the name of the type of car he drove. He always took one physical part from his old car and had it affixed to his new car, in some way, - welded, if necessary - to the new one. When I knew the late Tom Gibson, back in the days before they started calling us “disc jockeys”, he told his listeners he was driving a ”Pont-Ford-a-Stude-a-Chevy-lac”. In a sense it was his verbal “'trade mark”and I remember it well.
A.L.M. October 28. 2003 [c498wds]
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