Ozon to trademark zebra pattern in marketplace colors

Ozon intends to register the pattern of its corporate colors, which is already used in the interiors of the pick-up points, as a separate trademark. The company expects to protect the rights to brand materials that are provided to partners-owners of pick-up points in this way. Lawyers consider this step a movement towards registration of rights to corporate colors – Wildberries had previously unsuccessfully made such an attempt. At the same time, they note that the marketplace will have to prove the recognizability of the pattern in all types of goods and services mentioned in the application.

Kommersant found in the Rospatent database an application for registration of a trademark in the form of a zebra pattern in the corporate colors of the Ozon marketplace – blue and pink. The Ozon legal entity (“Internet Solutions”) submitted this application on August 24, and applications were also submitted for registration of Ozon logos with a stroke in the same pattern. Ozon told Kommersant that the registration of the corporate pattern “will help protect the rights to brand materials that we provide on an exclusive basis to partners who own pick-up points.”

The pattern is already used in the design of points of issue of orders, on packages and cars of couriers, the company specified. At the same time, Ozon’s application covers a significant amount of goods and services from eight classes of the International Classification of Goods and Services (ICGS) – from medical devices and utensils to office services.

Ozon’s decision to register a “zebra” in corporate colors can be considered an intermediate step towards registering corporate colors separately, says private lawyer Natalia Pantyukhina: “If now Ozon proves the well-established perception in the minds of consumers and partners of just such a color combination, then later it can monopolize the colors themselves “.

The rights to color trademarks for certain categories of goods and services in Russia are owned only by a number of large companies: Sberbank (green), MTS (red), Gazprom (blue), Vanish (pink) and Tiffany (turquoise). Marketplaces also showed interest in registering the rights to the corporate color: for example, Wildberries tried to register a shade of purple as a trademark (see “Kommersant” dated July 11, 2022). Rospatent refused Wildberries, and in September 2022, the intellectual property court refused the company to challenge this decision.

The declared color combination is already recognizable by consumers, “but there is no certainty that it is recognizable for all declared goods and services and that these colors are associated specifically with Ozon,” says Ekaterina Tilling, head of the intellectual property practice at Birch Legal. As Natalya Pantyukhina adds, the company will have to document that it uses this image in all the classes of goods and services it mentioned: “This is a very time-consuming and lengthy process, so I do not exclude that the list of protected goods will be reduced.”

Intellectual property lawyer Anastasia Skovpen confirmed that the need to register a color combination may be due to Ozon’s desire to “secure itself when concluding agency agreements for opening pickup points.”

Large companies can rely on the use of a corporate pattern when they “don’t want to use their name for new lines of business, but want the relationship to be read,” says CROS CEO Ekaterina Movsesyan. She noted that the more developed the company, “the deeper its brand book is patented,” and managers of large companies focus on protecting different elements of the brand. According to the founder of the creative agency SmartHeart Stanislav Okruh, companies began to understand that “one logo is not enough to influence the target audience, and patterns, shapes and colors complement this impact.”

Yuri Litvinenko