Oct 22nd
2007

Licensing 101: Sacrificing Your Core Audience To Gain New Market Share Kellogg’s Mistake

Posted by: Fashion06 in Fashion News, Promotion, Tip of the Day |

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Seems like Kellogg wants a larger chunk of the urban-youth market with the so-called launch of Under the Hood clothing company which is supposedly a premium licensed brand from the Kellogg Cereal Company by a company named WJ Holdings.

Now either someone is incredibly stupid and knows nothing about intellectual property, trademarks, copyrights and all that good stuff or Kellogg has made what they think to be a strategic move to gain ground in a new market. If the former is true I hope they have a great lawyer, because that is copyright infringement to the tenth power with the use of their name, characters, and registered trademarks. (Tony the tiger, Tucan Sam and more)

Now I’m all for marketing and attaining new customers, but isn’t a licensing move or associating your company with a brand suppose to better your business and help you gain more customers by having a positive affect on your branding without driving away your core following of consumers. Well to me that is exactly what Kellogg has done with the release of this clothing company to the public. I want to believe it was done against Kellogg’s knowledge, but considering I seen their ad in a major magazine that is distributed nationally I fail to believe that anyone would put that kind of marketing muscle behind a fashion brand that will be eventually sued for all it’s worth so the proper papers and licensing deal were probably attained and signed.

Considering that the actual styling and overall quality of the clothing isn’t bad, but the message and customer it will attract wouldn’t be good for Kellogg’s business.

I’m thinking this is going to be a failed attempt at exposing their brand to a new audience, because of the urban youth consumer that will be associated with the Under the Hood clothing brand, but whoever used Kellogg and hood in the same sentence?

It’s not like they didn’t have plenty of opportunities or many brands that wouldn’t jump at the chance to associate themselves with such a prominent company or at least offer them a private label design deal for a cut off the back end.

I sent an email so maybe a representative from the company will make an effort to clear this up.

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