‘Branded community’ leads to trademark morass

Jennifer Leggio of ZDNET Blogs received a letter from Rob Frankel of i-legions after she used the term "branded community" in a blog post on enterprise communities. It read in part -

"You probably don’t know about us (...TOTALLY different and way more effective, but that’s another story), so I need to make you aware: The term Branded Community® is a Federally registered trademark of ours. Your company should not be using the term at all without our express written consent. The article in this link is an example of your unauthorized use of the term...Please refrain from using the phrase in any other current or future materials..."

As Leggio wanted to be "better safe than sorry" she immediately changed "community" to "environment" and consulted her company's lawyers. It turns out Frankel has a trademark registration on "branded community" for advertising services. But they also confirmed the use of the text was "descriptive fair use of words in the English language." In fact, per Google, companies, analysts, journalists and marketing bloggers have used the term "branded community" upwards of 10,000 times. CNET’s legal team also concurred.

That irony is that i-legions is promoting Rob Frankel as "the best branding expert on the planet." Wouldn’t "the best branding expert" know any better?

Well, Jennifer admitted the letter sounds more like a sales pitch mixed with legal jargon. And considering that before the controversy, i-legions wasn't exactly a household name. Now it is being blogged about, albeit in a negative way. Still if you subscribe to the notion that any publicity is good publicity, then Frankel would, indeed, be considered a branding expert.

Either that, or it would be just another case of someone dooming his own company.