Snatching victory from the jaws etc etc -- Chrysler finds a way for the high school to keep its logo!
Lake Mary high school, 3,000 students strong, is located in Seminole County, Florida, about 30 miles from Orlando. Their mascot is a ram (see statue in pic), and when they designed their logo, it looked remarkably like Chrysler's Dodge Ram.
Technically, it's copyright infringement. There's a little wiggle room -- Cadillac dog food doesn't infringe, for example; it's in a completely different and non-competing market -- but the law is the law.
The LMHS transgression went unnoticed for years, time enough for the logo to appear on the backs of chairs, on the gymnasium floor, on book covers, stationery, and the rear windows of cars. Apparently, no harm no foul. But then some anonymous ASS (America is full of them) sent off a letter to Chrysler exposing the high school's advertising sin, even including photographic evidence. Now that the school had been officially outed, Chrysler was duty bound to react.
What to do? Several courses of action lay open. The easiest: ignore it. Chrysler has bigger fish to fry, and the LMHS Ram logo probably helped sell cars in Seminole County.
Next in the easy line: Contact the school and give them a lesson in good corporate PR. Point out the violation, and charge the school some nominal fee for the use of the logo, something like 20 bucks. Wanna be hard ass? Give them an instruction sheet on the 'proper' use of the logo, stuff like you can't put it on toilet paper, or make it a dartboard target, etc.
If Chrysler wanted to be creative, if they wanted to get a whole bunch of good, free publicity and a local sales spike, they could've adopted the school, gave them heavily discounted Ram vehicles for school use and whipped up 3,000 t-shirts that said LRHS and Chrysler LUV the RAMS!
Nah! Chrysler actually SUED THE SCHOOL and is forcing them to remove the logo from everywhere by June! Replacing the gym floor alone is estimated at $15,000!
It goes without saying that not a whole lot of Chrysler products are going to be sold in Seminole County this year, and about 3,000 impressionable youngsters will probably never buy a Chrysler product.
What does Chrysler gain from this? It's really difficult to conjure up any pluses -- they come away looking like nasty and ornery bullies who just don't care about Seminole County.
Jaxonia has a suggestion for this dippy corporation to salvage some respect from this fiasco. Help the school design a new, non-infringing ram, and then donate a new gym floor!
Originally published 2/17/10
Yeah, this is bad for the district but I think Lake Mary is where Tiger Woods lives or very close to it. He should cover the cost and be happy to do it. He could use some good PR and he has certainly made enough bucks from the auto industry. Didn't he endorse Buick a while back? He's going to make nice later today.
ReplyDeleteSue M is a GENIUS! Can anybody out there get this to Tiger before his tv appearance? He could announce it then! :-)
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