INLSA
Paula and Mike Schmidt, owners of Midlands cooldrink business Frankies, have won a case against Woolworths. The retail chain has been banned from using a slogan and bottle design for a similar soft drink line they say is a copycat of Frankies.
A family-run Midlands cool-drink manufacturer scored a “small guy” victory yesterday with an Advertising Standards Authority of SA ruling that retail giant Woolworths “deliberately and intentionally” copied its “good old-fashioned” branding on its vintage sodas. It ordered Woolworth to remove this line.
“We have won the battle, but not the war,” said Mike Schmidt, CEO of Frankies Olde Soft Drinks Co, who added that he would be meeting Woolworths CEO Ian Moir to “discuss many important issues”.
While he did not elaborate, it was believed there would be discussion around Schmidt’s assertions that the company not only stole its slogan, but that Woolworths’ entire vintage soda line – with its retro-shaped bottles, striped labelling and some identical flavours – was a copycat of the range he launched in 2006.
These issues were not raised in Schmidt’s complaint to the advertising authority, apparently for legally strategic reasons, but, if not resolved, could be the subject of a future court case.
Victory
Schmidt, after hearing of the ruling yesterday, said he had challenged Woolworths because he believed his brand was at stake “and we had to do whatever we could to protect it; this is a victory for small businesses”.
In terms of the ruling, Woolworths must remove all packaging bearing the words “good old-fashioned”, within three months. The ban on the words also applies to all media, for example any advertising using this pay-off line.
Woolworths said it was disappointed with the ruling, but would abide by it. “We will comply within the stipulated time frames,” said Moir.
“While we maintain that we have not copied the Frankies’s range, it is clear that public sentiment is against us. Customer opinion is much more important to us than the right or wrong of this issue, and the trust of our customers is far more valuable.
“We genuinely believed that the phase ‘good old-fashioned’ was descriptive and could be used across a range of vintage-styled products. Vintage products remain a global trend,” he said.
This was essentially the argument that the company submitted in response to Frankies’s complaint that it was a case of willful copying.
The advertising authority, in its ruling, said there was hardly any evidence to support Woolworths’ argument that the term “old-fashioned” was widely used in relation to sodas internationally.
The directorate said that – while Woolworths had submitted confidential minutes of a presentation meeting with its supplier, Chill Beverages, and a confidential design concept brief it prepared in June last year – neither of which made mention of Frankies – these documents did not explain where or how it came up with idea to use the phrase “good old-fashioned”.
“What is clear, is that on April 15, 2011, Frankies’s attorney wrote to Woolworths’ supplier indicating that it believed the phrase to be its advertising property. In the light of this, the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn… is that Woolworths deliberately and intentionally copied the phrase from Frankies advertising,” it said. 8BR
