Unregistrable
Ma®ch Madness
With March Madness winding down from the Sweet Sixteen to the Elite Eight and ultimately the Final Four, it seems only fitting that I find myself traversing upstate New York on a spring break college tour with our son, a high-school junior, to hear a dizzying barrage of information about GPAs, SATs, and the wonders of a capella vocal groups. With the deadline for this column looming, it seems that no obvious topic would emerge from the rarified atmosphere of academia. But then, traipsing the quad during the obligatory campus tour at a venerable university in Ithaca, the preternaturally cheerful student guide tells this story: over a century ago, two businessmen from a fledgling canned-goods company were on campus for an intercollegiate football game. While the details of the game itself have faded into oblivion, the event’s impact on trade dress can be felt every time we wander down the supermarket soup aisle. That’s because the two entrepreneurs at that primitive gridiron contest so admired the home team’s colors—carnelian and white—that they decided to use those very colors for the label of their new soup brand. That’s how the iconic color scheme for Campbell’s soup—immortalized in both commerce, art, and popular culture—came into being.
All due to an on-campus visit.
Has academia made other indelible contributions to the universe of trademarks? We know that researchers seeking a way to replenish athletes depleted from the punishing Florida sun invented Gatorade. And the Federal Express phenomenon, while setting the bar for overnight delivery services, purportedly sprang from a graduate thesis that barely made the grade. Then there’s Colgate University, whose founder’s son founded the toothpaste company now called Colgate-Palmolive. And Ben and Jerry began their marriage of confection at the University of Vermont. From Yale locks to Harvard beets, academia has been a breeding ground (figuratively as well as literally) for brand names and business concepts. So as this, the third and final of our college tours, winds down, the motto of what is perhaps the most revered institution of higher learning, Animal House’s Faber College, rings with newfound resonance: “Knowledge Is Good” indeed.