One of the dangers of establishing a marketable name for your company is that interlopers can sometimes grab that goodwill.
One of the worst cases of losing your name before you could use it is Burger King’s move into Australia a number of years ago. A local hamburger chain was already using the Burger King name, so the mature brand had to go by the moniker Hungry Jack.
Fortunately, Jack in the Box didn’t get into the fray—or Hungry Howie’s. It took several years and several dollars to get the use of its brand name in Australia, according to Bill Edwards, a consultant with Edwards Global Services.
Gerber baby food
Sometimes restaurants don’t steal, they borrow by using a variation of a company’s name, along with similar trade dress. When traveling overseas, we’ve seen a variety of Starbucks knock-offs, not to mention KFCs. One such copycat at the Paris Expo even loosely translated the Colonel’s tagline: "A simply lip licking flavor." Leave it to the French to be classier than we are. They lick their lips; we lick our fingers.
During a franchise trade mission to Jordan, we spotted a hole-in-the-wall chicken restaurant with the name Popeye’s. It looked a little bit like the Louisiana Kitchen model, except for the oversized picture of the cartoon character Popeye the Sailor Man. The U.S. Popeye chain was named after the fictional police officer, Popeye Doyle, in the movie The French Connection.
But the worst example of identity theft is a restaurant in Thailand that photoshopped a dictator’s face on KFC’s Colonel Sander’s aproned body for its chicken restaurant. KFC’s name wasn’t used, but even worse was the name they did choose: Hitler’s Fried Chicken. The news story on time.com, updated the original story later in the summer to say the name was changed to H-ler, to ensure there was no Nazi association.
Perhaps the only thing worse is people thinking you’re serving pureed baby. That’s what some people in Mexico thought, according to a speaker at the Women’s Foodservice Forum summit, when Gerber first introduced its jars of baby food with the picture of the Gerber baby on the label.
