Advertising slogan "Wash & Coffee" too unoriginal

The Court of General Court (EuG) had to address the question of whether the advertising slogan "Wash & Coffee" for an unusual service concept, namely the combination of a laundromat with a catering establishment, is capable of protection as a trade mark.

The mark "Wasch & Coffee" was applied for, inter alia, for the cleaning of clothing, the washing of laundry, the operation of a laundromat and the provision of catering services, as a European Union trade mark with the HABM. The Office raised objections to the application and ultimately rejected it on the grounds that the mark lacked distinctive character in relation to all the services claimed. In this respect, it constituted a mere description of the combined service offering.

The decision of the Court

The General Court (EuG) dismissed the action brought against this by judgment of 14.07.2014 (Az. T-5/12). According to the Court's view, in order to establish whether an advertising slogan is more than a mere advertising promotion, it must be examined whether the sequence of signs is so unusual or ambiguous in syntactical, grammatical, phonetic and/or semantic terms that it leads to specific associations of a different kind. This was not the case here. The Office had rather correctly assumed that the slogan "Wash & Coffee" merely conveyed the – accurate – notion that behind it lay a combined offering of a laundromat and coffee beverages.

This assessment does not change by virtue of the fact that the combination as such is unusual and possibly novel. The message hidden in the slogan "Wash & Coffee", which in the Court's view is not particularly original, is namely immediately intelligible without further effort of interpretation and is thus plainly descriptive.

Conclusion

The decision is thoroughly sound and inevitable. In the protection of advertising slogans, it is already extremely difficult to obtain protection for original creations. For simple, purely descriptive slogans, it is rightly impossible. In this respect, nothing different applies than for any other word mark.