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Call me Dave

February 2nd, 2011 · Posted by Skuds in Life · No Comments · Life

I find this story both hard to believe and hard to understand.  It says that the TV channel Dave has lost a case and is no longer allowed to call itself Dave.

On seeing the headline I thought it might be because some bloke called Dave launched a vexatious and entertaining legal challenge, but it turns out to be that when UKTV G2 rebranded itself as Dave it didn’t know there was already a company called Dave, which has taken the matter up and got a decision that Dave, the TV channel, can’t have the name.

So what is so hard to understand or believe in all that?

For starters, I have read a little bit about company rebranding and have worked for a few compaies that changed name.  Don’t they normally do a search to see if anybody else is using the name?   More often all that side of things is handled by agencies who specialise in such things who always bang on at great length (to help justify the huge fees that are published) about how they had to check each possibility against trademarks and companies everywhere in the world, and have to exhaustively check whether the proposed new name means anything unfortunate in any of the world’s different languages.

Did UKTV just go ahead without any checking or did they employ somebody who didn’t check very well?

The irony is that the other Dave is a brand consultancy who, you have to assume, specialise in such things.  Normally in these circumstances you might expect that the better-known and more wealthy company would come to some sort of arrangement with the more obscure company who would take a pay-off and quietly change their own name, but that can’t happen here – who would want to use a brand consultancy that couldn’t even protect its own brand?

I had never heard of Dave the brand consultancy, but then why should I have?  They are a niche business outside my field.  They are probably better known amongst whoever they pitch their services to (company directors?) and of course to rivals in the field.  Such as whoever advised UKTV.

All very amusing.  Dave, the TV channel is appealing, but if they lose what will they do?  The original name was chosen because, apparently, ‘everybody knows someone called Dave’.  I think they should, even if only to wind up the Littlejohns, rebrand themselves Mohammed. Everyone knows a Mohammed don’t they?  What could possibly go wrong with that eh?

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