T-Mobile’s Fierce Color Ownership
“Stop using magenta, or else.” is pretty much the message received by OXY, a smartwatch company, from a notice of “threatened opposition” from T-Mobile’s parent company Deutsche Telekom AG. OXY received the letter containing this message’s days before the the company was about to receive its official trademark.
At first it didn’t make sense why T-Mobile would got after Oxy and demand that they not use the color magenta in their branding. Oxy is after all a completely different market relating to wearable and not the telecom industry. However, after reviewing how many time T-Mobile has threatened other tech companies against using magenta in their products or marketing, it all started to make sense. Back in 2008 the telecom company threatened Engadget Mobile, a tech blog, for its use of magenta and again in 2013 sued AT&T’s Aio Wireless for using too similar a color scheme.
“Since we didn’t have the financial resources to fight Deutsche Telekom AG on this matter, and because we also didn’t want to just ignore them, we basically had two options left: We could either negotiate with Telekom to find a price for using the old logo, or we could change everything,” – Raf, OXY
Unfortunately OXY was forced to modify over 25K image files and designed work to avoid any legal problems. Below is OXY’s new logo and identity colors.
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