{"id":1335,"date":"2007-06-29T14:01:11","date_gmt":"2007-06-29T18:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/?p=1335"},"modified":"2009-02-19T17:44:24","modified_gmt":"2009-02-19T21:44:24","slug":"coca-cola-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/?p=1335","title":{"rendered":"Coca-Cola 2.0"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just got off the phone with Coca-Cola’s David Vanderpoel. You might recall his earlier comment<\/a> regarding the Coca-Cola VirtualThirst campaign in Second Life that came as a result of my critique of the competition rules.<\/p>\n

If you’ve not read my most recent post (reLink<\/a>), here’s the back story:
\n
\nOne of the VirtualThirst contestants<\/strike> participants had placed an item intended as part of the competition activities up for distribution on the Second Life Exchange website<\/a>. Someone reportedly contacted SLExchange informing them of the trademark infringement of not just Coca-Cola’s brand but others as well (actually, multiple hits rings alarm bells in my mind).<\/p>\n

The contestant contacted C.C. Chapman of marketing firm crayon<\/a>, the group responsible for the competition, and Chapman immediately contacted the people at Coca-Cola… who then contacted SLExchange and requested they not<\/em> police their trademark and that they reinstate the items which had been removed.<\/p>\n

Vanderpoel informed me during our conversation that Coca-Cola did not<\/em>, at any time, contact SLExchange to remove<\/em> items, which makes sense given that other brands were apparently included in that notification.<\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n

After I’d read the secondhand report that Coca-Cola had “released” their trademark, I immediately got to thinking that a) there was no<\/em> official guidance, and b) even I wouldn’t unconditionally<\/em> release a trademark.<\/p>\n

So I contacted C.C. Chapman who put me through to Vanderpoel. And I’ve got one thing to say: I’m impressed.<\/p>\n

First off, my understanding from our conversation is that no one should expect any official guidance from Coca-Cola. Additionally, I was informed that Coca-Cola simply doesn’t want an intermediary policing their brand for them. Nor do they want to interfere with the in-world economy when people are using their brand in ways that do not adversely impact them.<\/p>\n

Okay. So that part makes good, reasonable sense to me. But there’s more.<\/p>\n

For those people who feel the need to use the Coca-Cola trade dress in ways that are detrimental to the brand’s reputation, Coca-Cola is more interested in establishing a dialog to help them understand why people want to attack them in the first place than they are in trying to stop them.<\/p>\n

This is by far the smartest position I’ve seen a company take lately.<\/p>\n

Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t think the competition could have been set up a little better, but the fact that they engaged the community, they adjusted (to some degree) after competition launch, and are now taking this extraordinary stance is, honestly, a welcome surprise to me. My hope now is that word will get out and other companies will follow their lead.<\/p>\n

So much for the theory that old brands can’t learn new tricks.<\/p>\n

{Minor Update: to make minor correction and improve clarity}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just got off the phone with Coca-Cola’s David Vanderpoel. You might recall his earlier comment regarding the Coca-Cola VirtualThirst campaign in Second Life that came as a result of my critique of the competition rules. If you’ve not read … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-administrative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}