Lego became ”Legover” with the little plastic people depicted in a lewd manner. Nestle’s pet food brand Husky became ”Horny” with more of the same, involving dogs.
Coca-Cola’s ”You can’t beat the feeling” turned to ”enjoy Corruption, you can’t beat the stealing”, its diet product, ”Cannibal, life tastes good”.
Laugh it Off (LiO), a South African company, also changed logos for Caltex to ”Cult X”, Shell to ”Hell” and Red Bull into ”Dead Bull” on its T-shirts, that almost always elicit reactions.
For its part in giving local brand-weary, fashion-conscious rebels what they apparently crave, the company angered multinationals and a host of South African firms and ended up in court.
But it also attracted the interest and praise of the likes of global anti-brand campaigners worldwide, among them Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, and those behind the Canadian ”mental environment” watchdog Adbusters.
Swiss food and beverage producer Nestle, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Italian clothing and accessories label Diesel have all either threatened to sue or filed charges in court. South African Breweries (SAB), the world’s second largest, is
leading the pack with a supreme court challenge over LiO’s alleged misuse of its Black Label beer logo.
Several hundred T-shirts with the familiar logo corrupted to read ”Black Labour: White Guilt”, ”Black Neighbour: White Fence” made it into clothing stores.
The company is appealing a recent high court ruling that its output using the SAB brand bordered on ”hate speech”, made racial statements in a country with a racist past and that it was doing so using someone else’s brand.
”We’re making a T-shirt, but we’re admitting that we’re using their brand. We’re using it to make a point about issues such as labour exploitation in South Africa,” says LiO owner Justin Nurse.
But the Cape High Court ruled that it was SAB that was being exploited unfairly for commercial gain by LiO, and that the ”Black Labour” T-shirt was ”merely a lampoon” of the country’s trademarks and not a broader social commentary.
Another of its T-shirts that parodies cosmetic company ”Black Like Me”, making it ”Blacks Like Me”, a play on the sometimes awkward race relations in a society that is today the flip-side of one once deeply divided along racial lines.
Nurse says he is hopeful that if the supreme court appeal does not succeed, the country’s constitutional court will ultimately endorse his company’s carefully thought out satire.
”If we win, obviously they (other companies threatening legal action) will think twice,” he says.
”The interesting thing about this case is that there are very few cases worldwide that have used the right to freedom of speech to fight a charge of infringement of trademark and copyright,” he said.
LiO began marketing its subversive T-shirts and badges bearing similarly altered logos, images and statements in 1999, knowing that it could face legal action.
”Are we on some kind of media terrorist campaign for a brand-free universe? No,” LiO wrote on its website that urges consumers to ”think carefully about who owns your headspace”.
It took its cue from subversive campaigns worldwide that has seen the parody some of the world’s top brands such as McDonald’s.
”But we didn’t think people would take it so seriously,” says Nurse. – Sapa-DPA