Since last year, when Apple (of the Cupertino Apples) finally reached an agreement with Apple Corps (the Beatles), it’s been the Mac guys that won the brand and were granted full rights to use the cheerful icon with the jaunty angled leaf any way they wanted.  Recently, the city of New York introduced their own iconic apple with a jaunty angled leaf, and everything was fine until they went and tried to trademark it.  That’s when Apple filed an objection and started a controversy online. It shouldn’t be controversial, though.  As Nilay Patel in Engadget’s coverage puts it:

    This is exactly how the system is supposed to work, and Apple
    is just protecting its billion-dollar brand as best it can.

It certainly must annoy Apple’s marketing folks that their fruit icon which makes such an effort to cut through the noise of Manhattan’s outdoor advertising space must now compete with another similar fruit icon for the same space. 

There’s a lot of noise about how the marks aren’t identical (indeed this is not a case of Shepard Fairey style plagiarism), and many think that only an idiot would confuse them.  But the truth is that the marks will be used in similar contexts, and that it seems clear that the greeNYC campaign will benefit from the existing visual impact of the Apple logo.

When I creative direct designers who question whether a comp might carry a certain undesired connotation I often ask them to flip the equation around.  If they were trying to connote that particular idea with their design, would they succeed?  If the answer is “yes” then they might need to change their design.

A similar rule can be applied in the case of the greeNYC logo.  If greeNYC were trying to link their new would-be iconic mark with that of the preexisting ubiquitous campaign in their city, do they succeed?

I think the answer is yes.  Although our higher cognitive abilities are more than capable of discerning the differences between the two logos, it is their similarities that are the issue, and those similarities are the ones that can fool our subconscious pattern recognition.  The same part of our brain that makes us think “Cop! Slow Down.” when we see a black car with a white door in our periphery is the part that also says: “Pay Attention” when we see a billboard as we jog or drive by.

What are these similarities?  The silhouette is nearly identical, and that the leaf shape itself is highly similar.  The main differences are that Apple nearly always presents its logo as a solid form, and that the classic “bite” is not shared at all.  The last point is what New York is counting on, since, though they do leverage the weight of the Apple brand in many ways, the conscious mind won’t link the two since they don’t share that “bite.”

(I did flip the greeNYC for comparison)

The other thing that will probably tilt in favor of New York is that few people consciously remember Apple’s prominent packaging style from three years ago that informs not just the logo, but the rest of the greeNYC campaign.  The folks at Apple probably have little difficulty drawing an association.

Again, there are enough similarities here that the greeNYC campaign inherits the “cool factor”, and Apple’s marketing efforts can arguably be seen as being diluted to support another brand.

Will any of this have a bearing on the ultimate trademark decision?  I highly doubt it.  But I do understand the reason Apple is objecting.  That being said, the Beatles didn’t really market their material based on the strength of their Apple Corps brand,  yet they used the similarity between their mark and Apple’s to win huge concessions from the tech company over the years.

I think if New York city wants to make environmentalism seem as cool as the iPod, they should be prepared to face a fight when they trade on the “cool factor” earned by others, just as Apple did when it tried to make high tech not seem so nerdy by associating it with an icon of popular culture.