463diggsSo who owns the daisy? Apparently the Clorox Company has since September 2009, when they registered the mark "consisting of a flower with yellow petals with orange shades appearing toward the center of the flower, green center, and black shadow surrounding the green center." Method has been using daisies on its cleaning products for six years, but as they note in their video below, never bothered to register it, suggesting that Mother Earth held the patent on this one.
Method first graced the pages of TreeHugger in 2004 in one of our earliest posts;Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan were pioneers in the green marketing world, bringing transparency, humor, safe ingredients and good design to cleaning products.
In the opposite corner, Clorox and Greenworks.
Greenworks from Mega-corp Clorox launched with a bang, the blessing of the Sierra Club (and a whole lot of advertising on TreeHugger) in January, 2008. Hugely successful, they have been eating Method's lunch ever since. And now they want to eat their daisies. They have sent Method a cease and desist letter (pdf here) including the following friendly message:
Eric and Adam aren't folding. They are counterattacking with humor and style, demonstrating everything that they purport to be (two room-mates who started a company that grew) and making a big portrayal of Clorox as the big megacorp that is lawyered up and bleaches companies like Method out like damn spots.
Eric and Adam are running a campaign where you Vote Daisy, voting for Clorox, Method, or Mother Earth and bless them, they are urging you to vote for Mother Earth.
But no matter what the poll result is, there is no way that Clorox can win this war. They come off looking petty and evil, and forget that there is more to being green than what is in the bottle; business practices matter.
Besides, everyone knows that Lyndon Johnson owns the daisy.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen