Royal mess

Burger King’s trademark place is kind of funny.   If you Google His Majesty’s Monicker along with the word TRADEMARK, you get this link, which not only asserts, naturally, his royal BURGER KING® registered mark, but the far more dubious BK® mark down at the bottom, yet not at all (on that page) the ancient registered mark asserted at the Google search page, to wit:

burger-king-trademark-search
Too much paranoia?

Yeah — HAVE IT YOUR WAY.  I mean, WAY®.  Are they really still using that phrase?  Is using it in the invisible text that shows up in a Google search good enough for non-abandonment purposes?

The whole thing was raised in my mind upon a visit to James Lileks, who notes:

Burger King is a brand mess anyway. The logo looks like Speed Racer’s gallstone. The old logo got stale, but I’ll bet they want it back, because it would look totally old-school on one of those pre-distressed-for-your-convenience retro T-shirts that use lousy 70s graphics to indicate your hipness quotient. Compare all this flailing and “repositioning” to the competition: McDonald’s ads have always been bland and corporate and stuck in the soft-focus world of happy people having happy burgers; BK has had to take different tacks.

Lileks walks through them all, and links in turn to this Gawker item (not quite safe for home) which notes, in an item entitled World’s Cleverest Ad Campaign Is Big Failure, that McDonald’s has lately been eating BK’s (ah!), um, lunch.

That’s because McDonald’s runs boring ads that show All-American people enjoying their McDonald’s food, with a little jingle at the end, and Burger King runs ads that win ad awards. If only the average burger-eater were clever enough to appreciate [Crispin Porter Bogusky]’s brilliant branding techniques! You slob Americans get what you deserve, as will Burger King.

Now that sounds subversive, and treacherous too.

Of course I can’t eat in either of those places, and kosher burger wars tend to be resolved far more peacefully, and without recourse to suggestions of regicide.  But don’t get me started about the chicken…

Originally posted 2015-06-19 15:13:47. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Ron Coleman

7 Replies to “Royal mess

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  3. Yes, BK does continue to use the phrase. In BK’s current Transformers promotion, the slogan appears at the end of the commercial. Indeed, it would seem that it’s more than meets the eye.

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