3 ms·
A press release from a typical company will throw as much glitter on their own brand name as possible, and usually butcher the surrounding language a bit too:
by etal 17y ago
A press release from a typical company will throw as much glitter on their own brand name as possible, and usually butcher the surrounding language a bit too:
"the new FRISBEE [TM] brand Flying Disk..."
If a writer takes this literally, a copy editor has to tone it down or else the brand name will dominate the article text and make it look like an ad, too: "It's a Frisbee."
Fun variants include meaningless alternating caps, or a single lowercase 'i' inside an otherwise all-caps word.
Newspapers want to use the brand name, not the logo or an ASCII attempt at one; and in decades past, fixing the caps helped comprehension rather than hurting it. They considered capitalization part of presentation, not content. (Shouldn't a brand name survive an all-caps typeface?)
- sp332 17y agoIn the USA you can't use the brand name as a noun, or the owner risks losing legal control over the mark. Hence "FRISBEE [TM] brand Flying Disk."
- etal 17y agoOnly if it's used casually as a generic term. Keeping it uppercased proper noun (Frisbee) respects the trademark as far as the law is concerned, so that was the Associated Press guideline. Adding [TM] lets the owner emphasize that the trademark was applied for, (R) means it's fully registered, but neither symbol is required for mentioning the brand in print -- just simple capitalization is enough to respect the trademark.