If your aim in luxury real estate or any other branch of real estate is to have the majority of the market share in a niche or specialty, it is important that your brand is hard to blur, in other words hard to imitate. The logo and design should be original in order to prevent someone from copying your brand or colors making slight changes.
Blurring in legalese is known as “trademark dilution”. The intent is to confuse the consumer into buying your brand, because it is similar to something that is already familiar. A big firm whose logo has been blurred has the funds to sue and prove that the blurring party is affecting their business and profitability.
Pictured above is a perfect example of blurring in tuna. We have been partial to the Genova Brand of tuna for many years. As we passed the supermarket tuna aisle we noticed that Bumble Bee had rebranded. Prior to discovering Genova, we bought Bumble Bee exclusively.
You can see the original can on their website using a blue and white label, the one we were accustomed to. For someone in a hurry, it would be easy to pick up the new Bumble Bee rather than the Genova, especially since they share shelf space with Genova, and vice versa those wanting Bumble Bee may find the wrong brand in their bag when they get home.
Prior to starting our own commercial real estate firm in Los Angeles, we were wooed with a deal we could not refuse by a new company located minutes from our home in Brentwood on the Westside. The broker owner had branded his commercial real estate company as Citi-Pacific. He had spent large sums of money on the logo, video, signs, stationary cards, etc. It was intended by his branding company to give him as a new company a perception of legacy. Six months later, he received a nice cease and desist letter from Citi Bank’s law firm. They own the word “citi”. However, they were also willing to reimburse the costs (by providing invoices) he had incurred in branding. He had to change the spelling to “city”.
Recently, a web developer contacted us to ask us to send him business both as a developer and designer. He sent us his recent work for a real estate company/agent. It was clear that the template he used was one we had seen, over and over again.
It was a case of fill in the blanks: new agent photo, new location photo (sometimes using the same photo) for another agent in the area. We have seen that same site in the same marketplace done in different colors, and in some cases the same copy. We push both our graphic designer and our web developer to come up with something new and different, every time.
If you are tempted to blur to save money, don’t! Someone may send you a cease and desist letter especially if they have the means to do so. Blurring is a slippery slope. Eventually even if they do not sue, they will point out that you have monkey see, monkey do branding. In the case of Bumble Bee, it lowered our previous high esteem of the brand.
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