Apple once was a company whose trademarks were a living testament to sticking with a theme: APPLE as house mark, MACINTOSH for a product name, and then sub-brands like NEWTON[i] and PIPPIN.  How happy I was to be able to use them to illustrate for clients the power of themed branding, of marks that were arbitrary and thus strong and protectable, through someone’s genius at Apple.  But I can only guess that success breeds complacency, so despite the genius of such marks as APPLE and MACINTOSH, I think Apple somehow wanted to bring the nature of its products closer to the public – maybe to give the public a reason to spend that premium for Apple products.[ii]  So what better theme than being self-serving?  Add “I” to the product name!  They started by adding “I” to their existing MAC brand, and then moved to I IBOOK, ICHAT and before you know it, we’re where we are today, with ITUNES and IPOD and IPHONE, and a world of tsorres from a trademark perspective for trying to register and enforce those marks, but that’s not stopping them.  Still, when the Onion makes fun of your efforts at world trademark domination, you know it’s bad: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/53601. 

I worry though, that there’s something even more nefarious at work: Is someone at Apple really thinking “if we get them thinking about tunes or a phone and all the mental energy they have to exert is to add an ‘I’ we have instant mindshare?”  Are consumers that lazy now that they can only grasp the bare minimum of a differentiator before the generic term?  And when that differentiator is “I” what does that say?

My non sequitur of a response to my own rhetorical question is merely this: There’s no “I” in Teamocil, at least not where you’d think.  But seriously, for a company that once adopted the slogan THINK DIFFERENT[iii], Apple’s recent trademark selections are anything but different.