Legal brand protection is thus an attractive way of securing long-term competitive advantage. However, a brand is, of course, much more than a name and a logo. Brands carry emotional attachments, brands are your neighbours, your colleagues and your friends. In short, brands have the potential of providing customers with a variety of pleasant, or unpleasant, experiences. Given this new complex understanding of the brand, brand protection now has to extend far beyond the legal arena.
Brand protection extends to the entire company.
It has become a matter of managing the company's reputation in the eyes of its various stakeholders - including its customers, suppliers, trade partners and employees. Consider the Italian clothing group Benetton. The campaign is the work of Italian photographer and advertising guru Oliviero Toscani, who for more than two years visited death rows in several US prisons, photographing and interviewing condemned inmates. The campaign is intended to be an innovative form of corporate communication, in the tradition of earlier Benetton campaigns focusing on war, Aids, discrimination and racism. Toscani's images aim at giving back a human face to the prisoners on death row.