Once again Coke’s stymied its detractors by clawing its way to the top of the best brand recognition mountaintop. Perceived by the market as the top cola beverage in a crowded field, Coke’s bragging rights are secured for the time being with edgy ads, pervasive online presence, and new product rollouts – we’ll see on the Zero thing – that keep the competition off balance.

We thought they’d made another classic blunder when they pulled back from the bears. Guess again.

How’s your brand doing these days? Recognized? Recognized in a lineup of three? First to come to mind when someone mentions your channel or category? Brand development, building and maintaining is an ongoing part of any marketing plan that considers success inevitable. Learn from the best…it’s the real thing.

Clients often ask how they can protect their hard work from being stolen by imitators. Most think a patent is like Kevlar when it comes to fending off ripoff artists. They’re an important part of protecting your (manufactured) work, but we think an equally important level of security is afforded by trademarking a unique identifier for your product.

All you have to do is Google “Chinese copyright” to get a sense of the problem. The full magnitude of violations is huge; right now, the biggest stick in reining in the IP thieves are the upcoming 2008 Summer Olympics and the embarassing fallout the Chinese government hopes to avoid by launching an internal crackdown on the wholesale stealing of protected Western ideas.

While copyright is usually the second process that comes to mind in any discussion concerning intellectual property, that category was primarily designed to benefit fine art creators – publishers, writers, photographers, now web creators – and which extends to the marketing and advertising community.

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