Product Trademark Exercise

Product Name: Elia

Catchy Slogan: Quick, safe, reliable protection

Packaging Description: blue packet with Elia logo on the front, ingredients and summarized disclosure on the back. With large letters saying “Not For Consumption”.

Disclosures:

Here at Elia we strive to provide our customers with sunscreen that protects the skin from sun damage, reduces the risk of melanoma and other forms of skin cancer. With our paba free sunscreen, we go the extra mile to ensure you’re putting the best quality products on your skin. Not only is paba free sunscreen a healthier choice for your skin, but your overall well being. Every Elia brand sunscreen is evaluated and approved for safety and quality before being put on the market. With our small, convenient packets our sunscreen can easily be brought to the beach, pool or any sunny outdoor event.

Discussion

The first thing we discussed when creating our sunscreen product was what our target market was going to be. We based our decision on what our product has to offer. It is a paba-free sunscreen, which offers health benefits to people with sensitive skin. It also is packaged in small ketchup like packets that are perfect for travel and on-the-go use, which could be beneficial for mothers. Having the sunscreen in smaller packets makes it perfect for not only the beach or pool, but outdoor sporting events. Oftentimes families have a lot of responsibilities when it comes to packing everything needed for an outdoor adventure, our small sunscreen packets make packing easy taking up little to no room. Therefore, we decided our target market was families and people with sensitive skin.

We realized there were some problems we wanted to avoid in our products packaging. Since the sunscreen is packed in ketchup sized packets, they could be mistaken for condiments. This could cause people to accidentally eat the sunscreen and blame us for it. To avoid this, we decided to abstain from using colors commonly associated with condiments like ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise (red, yellow, and white), so we used blue. As another way to keep consumers from mistaking our product as food and protect ourself from legal issues, we decided to put “Not for consumption” on the back in large font.

Since we are claiming health benefits with our product we had to be careful with what exactly we claimed and disclosed to protect ourselves from litigation. The paba-free aspect of our product is certainly a selling point as paba has been proven to cause allergic reactions, linked to liver damage, and has the potential to create cancerous cells.

After looking up our name “Elia” on uspto.gov, we found that Elia was already trademarked. So we had to change our name.

When thinking about our product we decided to change our name to focus more on the product shape than the sunscreen itself. Since our product differentiates itself from other sunscreen brands using a small, portable ketchup-like packet, the name SunSqueeze puts emphasis on the action one performs when using the product. There are many Paba-free sunscreens on the market today, but few come in the packaging that ours does. We believe it is important to highlight the convenient, easy to travel with packaging to target anyone who may be looking for an easier way to carry their sunscreen.