Good, Enough? Really, as a Trademark?

By Steve Baird® on February 18, 2019

No worries, I’m back at the keyboard, refreshed after a busy January, from the ATA Show in Louisville to Las Vegas for the SHOT Show, then Austin, and well beyond.

2019 is off to a rapid start, not sure where the first half of February went, so I’ll make sure this is a good one, and with a little luck, it might even be a great one:

Did my iPhone capture a production anomaly in the soap on display? Note the disconnect between the word and the stuff that I’m not sure I’d want to rub on me.

How often do we hear, “Oh it’s good enough,” or “Yeah, it’s pretty good”? — Good seems pretty watered down today, bordering on being just OK, a passing grade.

Kind of reminds me of AT&T Wireless’ funny Just OK Is Not OK commercials. Let’s just say, good seems much further from CNP than BGE — Barely Good Enough.

A Friday evening shopping run to Whole Foods provided inspiration for this blog post; as you will recall, it’s not the first, others preceed it, e.g., here, here, and here.

So, imagine my surprise that someone actually would try to “brand” soap as good.

Turns out, that someone has infused more than the common meaning into the word, incorporating the more active “do-good” kind, with a real social impact.

Before learning of that aspect to the brand, I was left wondering, is good — well, enough to serve as a distinctive trademark, in other words, is it ownable, as IP?

Turns out, it apparently is, Good Soap is federally-registered for “sustainably manufactured beauty products, namely fair trade shea butter soap” — no less than 500+ pages of evidence was submitted to establish acquired distinctiveness.

At the end of the day, I’m still left wondering about the reasonable scope of rights?

With the mildly laudatory Good, it’s probably no surprise that other coexisting soap marks have slipped into the same laudatory-themed bubble bath as Good Soap:

Besides all those, why did the USPTO allow this Good soap mark to coexist, much less achieve federal registration without a showing of acquired distinctiveness?

Perhaps another less-than-wonderful style of truncated examination at the USPTO?

With a broader identification of goods, covering simply “soaps” — and no apparent “do-good” double meaning, how did the informational matter refusal slip by too?

Back to what Good might mean to consumers, at first blush, it seems facially about managing normal expectations, but Great is about exceeding them.

Assuming the product attributes live up to the name, wouldn’t a brand rather be great than simply good? In other words, can Good Soap, ever be a Great brand?

By the way, this is not anywhere close to our first soapbox when it comes to getting lathered up over soap trademarks:

You can be the judge of what is good versus great. Yes, lather, rinse and repeat.