The Transformation and Evolution of Trademarks - From Signals to Symbols to Myth Articles and Reports 82 The Trademark Reporter 1992

82 Trademark Rep. 301 (1992)
The Transformation and Evolution of Trademarks - From Signals to Symbols to Myth

handle is hein.journals/thetmr82 and id is 321 raw text is: THE TRANSFORMATION AND
EVOLUTION OF TRADEMARKS-
FROM SIGNALS TO SYMBOLS TO MYTH
By Thomas D. Drescher*
I. INTRODUCTION
Perhaps you would like to have acquired The Coca-Cola
Company in 1986. If so, would you have been willing to pay
billions of dollars for something you could not touch, feel, grasp,
weigh or measure, for a mere intangible, a simple name? On May
8 of that year the COKE beverage was one-hundred years old.
What would the company have been worth? Wall Street's
estimate was $14 billion; yet, the company's hard assets, its real
and personal property, were valued at only $7 billion. The other
$7 billion was the value of the COCA-COLA trademark.' Julius
R. Lunsford, Jr., who at the time was with The Coca-Cola
Company's legal department, provided a vivid illustration of
trademark value: The production plants and inventories of The
Coca-Cola Company could go up in flames overnight. Mr.
Lunsford asserted. Yet, on the following morning there is not a
bank in Atlanta, New York, or anywhere else, that would not lend
this Company the funds necessary for rebuilding, accepting as
* Associate in the firm of Ross & Hardies, Chicago, Illinois, Associate Member of
U.S Trademark Association; Ph.D. 1979, York University (Tlbronto, Canada); J.D. 1988,
Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri); Subcommittee Chairman of USTA Education
Committee's Literary Paper Subcommittee. Copyright © 1992 Thomas D. Drescher. This
article was prepared and undertaken in 1991 and written at the request of the USTA
Education Committee. The author wishes to thank the USTA Education Committee and,
in particular, its Chairman at that time, Melvyn A. Silver, for their support of this project,
and wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the cogent comments and contributions of Ronald
R. Kranzow and Julius R. Lunsford, Jr. who were kind enough to act as readers of this
article in earlier drafts. The author is also happy to have the opportunity to thank Monice
M. Kaczorowski, Director of Libraries at Ross & Hardies, and her staff, particularly Jean
Sanders, for their valuable research assistance.
1. COCA-COLA: Things Better Go Better, The Economist, p 98 (May 10, 1986):
Wall Street now values the company at $14 billion-$7 billion more than the value
of the company's assets (machinery, buildings, etc). That, roughly, is what the
trademark is worth.

301

Vol. 82 TMR

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