Can a country, city or region really make a mark as a brand? Richard Brass looks at the places and the people who are flexing their IP Rights in a new wave of patriot games...

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Huntington Beach in California’s exclusive Orange County is so well known for its warm water, good waves and surf-related retail outlets that the local authorities and business community last year thought it would make sense to lock in the benefits by registering the name ‘Surf City USA’ as a trademark. But one person’s logical business decision is another’s rapacious attempt to cash in on a natural feature at the expense of others. The application had barely been filed when a ferocious surf war broke out with the city of Santa Cruz, 400 miles up the coast.

For communities famous for their laid-back attitudes, ‘Moniker-gate’, as it became known, was fierce. A bill was introduced into the state senate to enshrine Santa Cruz as Surf City USA. Angry deputations jetted into the state capital to argue their case. Websites shook with unprintable vitriol about the rivals’ surfing conditions and water temperature, and local surfers’ relationships with their mothers. The state senator for Santa Cruz summed up his argument in distinctly Californian style: ‘Surf City is as much a state of mind as it is a place,’ he said, ‘and you can’t trademark a state of mind.’ Refusing to throw in the towel, the Huntington Beach senator countered that this missed the point and even brought in the Beach Boys to back him up: ‘I’ve done some research,’ he said. ‘Neither city has two girls for every boy, so neither should be Surf City.’

The battle of the beaches highlights the difficulty of applying for geographical trademarks. Trying to register the most harmless-sounding line can leave you open to all kinds of attack, whether on legal grounds, emotional ones, or on the possibly more damaging basis that long-term, it’s just a bad line.

For communities famous for their laid-back attitudes, ‘Moniker-gate’, as it became known, was fierce. A bill was introduced to enshrine Santa Cruz as Surf City USA

For example, when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced that the city had applied to trademark the slogan ‘The world’s second home’ as part of its bid for the 2012 Olympics, no other city jumped up to challenge for the title, but plenty of New Yorkers jumped up to shoot it down. How could the Big Apple claim to be the ‘world’s second home’, some asked, when many of its own citizens didn’t even have a first? Similarly, in Montana earlier in 2005, a Las Vegasbased developer applied to trademark the slogan ‘The last best place’. Ever since the phrase was used as the title for an anthology of Montanan literature in 1988, it has been the state’s unofficial slogan, and the attempt by a wealthy entrepreneur to claim it for his own purposes and gains, created more uproar than the state had seen since the Unabomber was found lurking in the hills in 1996.

But geographical trademark applications are only likely to increase as the idea spreads that countries, regions and cities need to brand themselves if they are to survive and prosper in a globalised environment. Even the most obscure places are turning to branding as a way of being noticed in a noisy, uncaring world.

Poland is in the middle of a branding campaign emphasising the youth of its population, Croatia is pitching itself as the new Riviera, and many others are wondering how they can emulate Colombia’s success in selling itself as the land of coffee. It’s also fair to say that some branding campaigns, like the UK’s Visit Britain manifesto, have sparked an umbrella of sub-branding successes and now help attract tourists in their droves.

But some places present a real challenge to the branding consultant’s art. Detroit is currently going through the rebranding process, but a city whose unofficial slogan seemed to morph from Motor City to Murder City seemingly overnight – and stuck like mud – could have a long way to go. Luckily, there is a solution. If they can just get hold of some sand and a wave machine, they might just be on their way...

This article was first published in IP Review, issue 13

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