Scientists think this could be the way to tell whether logos are too similar.
against... erm, an unknown children's clock company. In most cases, the argument is the same: the consumer will be confused. But how can we really tell if a right-minded person would confuse a cheap cartoonish children's clock with a $6,000 Swiss watch? Well, how about we scan their brains?
That's the rather dystopian proposal put forward by former Berkeley Haas postdoctoral researcher Zhihao Zhang and a team at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia in a paper in. They reckon that brains scans would be an objective way to find out whether people see a likeness in two logos.
Previous research shows that the brain supresses activity when it sees an image similar to one it has seen before. So the team's solution is to establish similarity in logos using functional magnetic resonance imaging together with a technique called repetition suppression .To test the theory, they put test subjects in fMRI scanners and showed them pictures of brands and hypothetical copycats.
To illustrate the challenges, Zhang holds up the example of a dispute between the well-known toothpaste brand Colgate losing a challenge againstbecause the judge decided the branding was not “substantially indistinguishable.” (We were also amused last year whenThere are some limits though to the proposal, though. The method can't decide how similar is too similar. Dr Team member Andrew Kayser from UC San Francisco says that would still be up to a judge to decide.
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