44 ı Intellectual Property & Design Rights
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AVID Ogilvy, the advertising guru and founder of Ogilvy & Mather, famously said: “You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.” The successful retailer will be familiar with the alchemy employed to spark the purchaser’s ‘interest’ and will likely have this in mind when selecting products for sale; perhaps targeting products whose standout appeal comes from the attractive power of brand familiarity, or those whose allure is driven by shape, colour or texture, or products easily promoted by a persuasive underlying story. These are all familiar tools in the sales and marketing magic box, each harnessed to engage interest in the product offering and hopefully commit the consumer to purchase. In today’s multiple-choice market, where we are confronted with an infinite sea of similar type and priced products, each jostling and competing for attention, often one of the most effective ways of differentiating between offerings is using aesthetics. In this context, a visual design element is one of the significant factors that influences consumer perceptions. Take, for example, purely functional products. Functionality is a difficult sell in a crowded market, where expectation of function satisfaction is usually taken as a given. At the end of the day, a squeezable bottle of washing detergent holds detergent, a toothbrush cleans your teeth, and scissors cut paper. When confronted with offerings to satisfy largely functional needs and where price is less of a factor, as consumers, our product purchasing
IRISH PACKAGING & PRINT
choices are typically driven by other nonfunctional considerations such as shape, colour, pattern, texture or size over our expectation of product performance. This is particularly the case with luxury items.
Good design sells Consider the last time you removed a quality bottle of wine from its clean, precision cut gift-box or slid open a tray of chocolate truffles from its presentation chest. How did it feel? Was the unboxing a sensual event and perhaps you even smiled during the revelatory process? And of course, everything about this introductory experience is intentional and design-led. Aesthetics can make a product seem more trustworthy and thereby enhance the expectation of quality, which are major selling points in any marketplace. It is well recognised that consumers tend to make decisions based on reliability and trust, so you need to make them feel that in choosing a product they have placed their faith in responsible, intelligent hands. This is where good designers and marketers can work together to better assess what consumers are responding to and, if necessary, rebrand or redesign the product or its packaging.
Design rights A recognisable design not only enhances product identity but, importantly, it can be protected as intellectual property. For the uninitiated, design rights comprise a separate body of intellectual property rights to copyright or trademarks. In essence,
The shape of things Mathew Forde, Partner at Lewis Silkin Ireland specialising in Intellectual Property law, explains exactly why design registration is so important. designs rights protect the appearance of things, by which we mean the shape, configuration and ornamentation of products or articles. To enjoy protection, the design must be novel, which means it must not be identical to an existing design already available to the public. The design must also have individual character, which means that the overall impression it produces on informed users must differ from the overall impression produced on similar users by an earlier design. Registered designs are increasingly being used by businesses and designers to protect their products and related market positions. Design right protection in Ireland is complex and multi-layered. First, there are Irish registered design rights, which last for 25 years. There are also unregistered EU design rights, which last for three years, and registered EU design rights, which also last for 25 years. The key takeaway is that registered rights are generally easier to enforce than unregistered rights and last much longer.