Apple is very concerned about brand image. Something that is logical if one takes into account that it is the first company to be worth three million million dollars. But even with so much money, there are things that, no matter how hard they try, are materially impossible to control. And the truth is that they have not only dealt with an Alpine firm. But with several others, and the reason is the apple fruit itself. In this post we tell you what is happening with all this matter.
The Apple logo is an apple, but not all apples are the Apple logo.
The Fruit Union Suisse company is 111 years old and is a fruit producer in that country. Your logo? An apple with the flag of the country. And why an apple? Because it is one of the most popular fruits in the region. As this has caused them to enter into a strange conflict with Apple. And this has not been induced by the Swiss company, but by the Cupertino company.
In information released by WIRED magazine, the alpine firm «heHe is concerned that he may have to change his logo, because Apple is dealing with intellectual property rights on the representations of the apple fruit«.
“We have a hard time understanding this, because it’s not like they’re trying to protect their bitten apple. Their goal here is really to own the rights to a real apple which, for us, is something really near universal that should be free for everyone to use,” Jimmy Matriéthoz, director of Fruit Union Suisse, told WIRED.
It is not the first time that Apple goes for apples
If it is already surprising that Apple claims the logo of a 111-year-old European fruit-producing company, it is even more surprising to learn that in 2017 they tried to do something similar, they explain from WIRED. Thus, the American company “submitted an application to the Swiss Institute of Intellectual Property requesting the intellectual property rights for a realistic representation in black and white of an apple variety known as Granny Smith«.
And what was the result? Well, in the fall of 2022, Apple only has usage rights in certain aspects, the ones most related to their activity, regarding the image of the apple that they wanted to record. But that “generic images of common goods, such as apples, are in the public domain,” they explain.
If you have an apple, Apple demands it from you
The same medium reveals that those from Cupertino have gone all out, and they reveal a report from the Tech Transparency Project published in 2022. An example is the case of a food cooperative (again Swiss), with which they reached an “out-of-court agreement” with which they promised to never ever put an image of a bitten apple in their ad campaigns. In the image below you can see some logos that Apple has gone for them, as explained in the Tech Transparency project.
But you have also tried to go for the logo of a German cycle path, retailers, manufacturers, a songwriter named Frankie Pineapple (the fruit is a pineapple), and even a food delivery app, whose brand image was a pear!. Pineapples, apples, oranges and pears make up the salad of conflicts that Cupertino’s have carried out, of which there is no official response or statements from the company.