[Talk-GB] RFC-2 mechanical edit: UK shop names

David Woolley forums at david-woolley.me.uk
Sun Nov 2 14:56:23 UTC 2014


On 02/11/14 13:24, Matthijs Melissen wrote:

>
> - 'Brantano Footwear' versus Brantano
> Some shops signs include the 'Footwear' text, others don't. I would
> argue that 'Footwear' in the logo is not part of the title, but a
> description of the shop's activities. For example, we also don't tag
> 'name=Cafe Nero The Italian coffee company' or 'name=Poundland
> Everything's £1'. We currently have 116 times Brantano and 12 times
> Brantano Footwear in the UK. The shop's website doesn't include the
> word 'Footwear', but their Twitter does. Opinions?

At least one place on their web site refers to them as Brantano 
Footwear.  My feeling is that this part of the "trading as" name, but 
the problem seems to be that Brantano's marketing director is not very 
strict on such issues.  Some companies, like Microsoft 
<http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/IntellectualProperty/Trademarks/EN-US.aspx>, 
will issue strict guidelines to the press and to other businesses using 
their name, as to the exact form of their name to be used.  Being at the 
end of the supply chain, shops have less need for this.	

Brantano don't have a distinct corporate web site and don't seem to have 
a trademarks guidelines document.  They do have a contact address for 
their press officer, which might be the way to find out the, current, 
official position.

> believe that Jones Bootmaker, Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Pizza Express,

Lloyds Bank is an example of where the description of the business is 
definitely part of the trading as name.  This is probably to avoid 
confusion with Lloyd's, a different sort of financial services 
organisation.  The latter does have heavyweight branding guidelines.

> Cafe Rouge, Greggs, Primark, and Max Spielmann should be tagged in
> uppercase too. The fact that the names are abbreviations is not a
> reason to capitalize either: ASDA stands for Asquith and Dairies, so
> the etymology gives no reason for capitalizing the S, at least. Aldi
> and Lidl use lowercase on their website, while SPAR uses uppercase,

SPAR state that SPAR is a registered trademark on their legal page. 
Unfortunately that same page forbids deep linking, so I can't tell you 
where it is :-(  Whilst that could be for stress, their consistent use 
elsewhere makes me think that capitalisation is part of the trademark.

> and Asda/ASDA uses a mix. I'm not sure what to do here.

ASDA's legal pages consistently capitalises, even though they seem to 
use Asda in press releases.





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