I was at an excellent one-day conference hosted by the University of Geneva Law School recently. In between speakers I rushed out to a vending machine in the lobby to get a bottle of water. I knew I wanted sparkling and I was in a hurry. When faced with a choice between a bottle with a blue label and a bottle with a green one, I knew immediately to chose the green. Everybody knows that blue is still and green is sparking, don't they?
Certainly in Ireland this rule is universally applied. I wonder how it started. Perrier is green. And the first Irish brand of water, Ballygowan, used a green label. I wonder when blue began to be used to distinguish the still from the sparkling. A stroll down the supermarket aisles of Spain or France seems to confirm that the same rule applies elsewhere.
However it came to be, it illustrates how consumers can be trained to assign meaning to certain features. Of course, only when the meaning relates to the origin of a product does it become appropriate to considered it for registration as a trade mark. Where patients have assigned meaning to certain drug colours and shapes, it raises some interesting questions. Is the meaning acquired to do with the origin or type of drug?
