Monster Mistakes of Branding. Hansen gets schooled in Oz.

Monster Energy drinks are everywhere - or so the company would like everyone to believe.  Hansen Natural Corporation has pushed the drink into stores across the nation, filling the convenience store shelves with everything from diet drinks to Russian coffees.  Monster has become synonymous with energy drinks, where the entire market is being led by only a small handful of companies.  Monster is international, selling well in the US and about 27 other countries.

The trouble is that Australia was not one of those countries.

Bickfords is a major drink company in Australia, having produced drinks for over 125 years.  Of course, seeing how the energy drink market has exploded everywhere, they followed suit and came out with their own line of unique energy drinks, calling them, you guessed it, "MONSTER ENERGY".  Upon doing an  Australian trade mark register and found that the names MONSTER and MONSTER ENERGY were not the subject of any actual or pending registrations developed and started distributing their new Monster Energy drinks in April 2006.   Australian energy drinkers now had a Monster to call their own.  They even have the domain name http://www.monsterenergy.com.au

So they contacted monster in the US and asked about licensing deals, and basically to shake hands  - and Hansen did what Americans are prone to do.  Sue the pants off them.

Hansen took them to Australian court, trying to prove that there was NO WAY Bickfords could not have known all about Monster.  Hansen went on to show all the sponsorship of extreme sports events and athlete endorsements around the world - even though you could not buy the actual drink anywhere in Oz but online.  The Court required Hansen to establish that, as at the date that Bickfords started to sell their product, potential customers within Australia would be likely to be misled and buy the Bickfords version instead of the Hansen version.  Of course, Hansen trolled out their horribly designed website, trying to use it to prove that internet users in Australia might have stumbled in and now knew the brand.

In the end, the Court stated that " After all, the law promotes innovation and local competition, and the Court must be mindful not to make orders to protect persons who do not establish on the evidence that their brand is sufficiently well known in Australia."  Basically, if you are unknown in that country, other makers can feel free to call and design their products with your branding and name and do whatever they want with it.

All international companies  should know, just because you trade marked something in the US does not mean it can not be made in another country you don't export to. In this market where billions of dollars are at stake, it would be an error of monster proportions to let your brand name slide.

Source:http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=62320