What’s In A Name?

If you are going to build a brand, then you had better protect it. Sounds obvious – but what does that mean? What does “protecting” a brand mean and what happens if you don’t? Let us take an example close to my own heart – and waistline – beer.

In 1876 Adolphus Busch and Eberhard Anheuser in St Louis, USA stuck a pin in a map of Europe and chose the town name of Budweis for their rice beer. Budweiser was born and the men registered the name as a trademark in the USA. They could have chosen anywhere, but they happened to choose a town with six hundred years of brewing tradition, in which Budweiser beers were produced.

For years not much happened – Anheuser-Busch (AB) sold its brew in the emerging USA while the current brewery, Budweiser Budvar, sold to its local area. It was not until 1911 that the two breweries locked horns, at a trade fair where AB agreed not to sell its product in Europe while Budvar agreed not to sell its lager north of the Panama Canal. A happy, sensible and amicable solution was formed.

Sadly, AB became a powerful and greedy corporate animal. Leaving Europe alone was not possible in its growth plans and so it broke the agreement and targeted Western Europe. At the time, Budvar was behind the iron curtain and only sold within Eastern Europe, so again there was little danger of clashes. It was only with the fall of the Berlin Wall that trouble loomed. AB began to be frustrated when it targeted Eastern Europe by this little brewery from the Czech Republic and the legal war began.

AB claimed that it has registered Budweiser (and Bud) as a trademark 17 years before the Budvar brewery opened. Budvar on the other hand points out that it is actually much older, tracing its roots back to the 13th century, and that Budweis is a Geographical Indicator (GI) in the same way as Sherry or Champagne.*

AB has since chased Budvar into courts around the globe, and as a result the two breweries have rights to the names Budweiser and Bud in different countries. The most interesting result came here in the UK where it was agreed that both parties could use the name. Sadly for Budvar, its GI claim on the name was defeated by a World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruling last year that declared that GI could only be used for the current language of the product (Budweis was the original German name for the town, which has since been renamed in Czech Budejovicke). AB therefore claims that Budvar can no longer use GI as a defence. This is an interesting decision and it is yet to be seen if anyone challenges Sherry as a GI (Sherry is an Anglicisation of the town of Jerez).

The legal battle looks set to continue and whatever the rights or wrongs of both sides, it shows a valuable lesson. If you have a brand, make sure it is trademarked in every country you may want to sell to in the future. Furthermore, never trust another party in a dispute to stick to their side of the bargain.

But what of the consequences? I suspect that if Budvar were a private business, rather than its state-owned form, it could not afford to fight global legal wars. AB would either drive it into the ground or buy it and close it down. It is not the only time AB has acted heavy-handedly to protect its brand – amazingly it took Dubuisson Frères brewery of Belgium to court for brewing a beer named Bush because it could be confused with Anheuser-Busch.

I wonder if we will see anyone taking Pilsner Urquell (the original pilsner lager from Pilsen in the Czech Republic) to court for using the word Pilsner? Well I’m off to help fund Budvar’s battle before I take Branston Pickle to court…

* As an interesting aside, Scottish Courage has been banned from closing down the Gallowgate Brewery in Newcastle upon Tyne, where it brews its Newcastle Brown, because it filed for GI years earlier and so it can not be brewed at any of its non-Newcastle sites.

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