BrandSoup was busy tweeting from an agricultural law seminar recently (#agspringseminar but don’t worry if you missed it – there’s another one planned for the autumn). Not a naturally brand-rich event you might think, but that was kind of the point of being there – trying to instil an appreciation of brand values into what lawyers and accountants call “agri-businesses” but everyone else calls “farms”.

There were some good talks on a range of issues affecting today’s food producers. A chap from the NFU brought us up to date on reforms to the like-it-or-loathe-it-you-can’t-avoid-it Common Agricultural Policy and his slides carried a couple of logos which were very different but both very good in their own way.

There was the NFU’s own cheery, “green rainbow” logo:

with all its connotations of bright futures, ploughed fields, green & pleasant lands etc.

And there was the rather more old-fashioned NFU Mutual,with its stylised golden wheatsheaf, redolent of rich harvests, storing away surplus for the future, well-earned rewards of honest toil and so forth.

This is what good logos do; they serve to identify their parent enterprise, and they also try to convey a sense of its values and objectives – in other words, its brand. The NFU and NFU Mutual are private organisationsand are perfectly entitled to spend their (members’) money as they see fit. They seem to have done a good job in commissioning these designs, butit’s a different matter with the public sector.

The next talk covered some of the various quangos which regulate a farmer’s life. A lot of the derision these “non-departmental public bodies”attract is probably unfair – they can’t all be the domains ofunimaginativejobsworths and myopic meddlers, can they? But they certainly deserve a kicking on at least one score: they have TERRIBLE logos. Yes, Gangmasters LicensingAuthority, we’re looking at you. Andthe Vehicle and Operator Services Agency. And Health & Safety Executive. In fact, of the ones we considered in the talk, only the FSA’s logo (no, not that FSA – the food safety guys) seemed anywhere near half-decent.

Some brand-design insiders have described this kind of thing as nothing more than “very expensive clip-art”. At a cost of tens (and occasionally hundreds) of thousands of pounds, a few colours, shapes and letters are flung together to no apparent purpose and with no apparent forethought, but usually with an awful lot of self-justifying over-analysis. And that’s even before you begin to question whether a quango needs a logo anyway, especially one so sophomoric.

Given that they don’t have to attract customers (we’re “taxpayers”, no matter what they try to tell us) why do they feel the need to bother? What kind of distinctive brand values are these logos supposed to be communicating? What kind of recognition do they bring? And how much public money gets spent on these aberrations and then again on their all-too-regular replacements?

Not all publicsector logos are bad by any means. And not all are pointless: BR and MOT spring to mind as timeless classics. The NHS’ recent offering also looks promising – crisp, clean, recognisable. But most are nowhere near as long-livednor as well thought out as these,and often seem to be a vainglorious waste of time and (our) money.

Well, the good news is that UK Central Governmentnow seems to agree. As of 2012, as part of a drive to reduce cost and present an impression of “single government”, all government departments have been sharing a minimalist common identity. It may be simple, it may even be boring, but it was designed cheaply in-house and should put a stop to all those “non-logo” excrescences we’ve had foisted on us in recent years. Here’s a quick sample of the old and the new so you can judge for yourselves:

We like them (especially if they mean no more Home Office “nail-clippings”) – they’re simple, straightforward, dignified and should need only minimal maintenance. We think all public bodies should take a leaf out of Whitehall’s book. The much-heralded “Bonfire of the Quangos” may never have happened, but let’s hope we can look forward instead to a Bonfire of the Quango Logos.

You can’t get a better illustration (forgive the pun) of the power of a brand than the recent abortive sale in Miami of a Banksy which had last been seen attached to the wall of a north London Poundland. Setting aside the furore over who actually owns the work and who has the right to sell it, there’s another more basic consideration here: most graffiti is not considered worthy of a $700,000 pricetag, or even a pricetag at all. More usually a fixed-penalty fine. So what makes this so different?

It can’t be the judicious use of brushwork or colour – like most of Banksy’s work, Slave Labour is a spray-painted stencil and largely monochrome. It’s well executed, certainly (but as Dr Johnson might have commented that’s not so much the point as that it’s been executed at all). What really adds all those zeroes to the valuation is the (pseudonymous) identity of the artist.

It’d be hard to pin-down exactly what is going on, but something has clearly happened to turn a piece of [probable] criminal damage into world-class art and news. For want of a better label, let’s call that something “brand Banksy”. Like all good brands, it adds a “je ne sais quoi” to the ordinary and makes it special. You can imagine that if Damien Hirst were to dabble in street-art, we might be in similar territory, but if Brand Soup were to try anything similar – no matter how similar – the result would not be worth more than a passing mention.

This isn’t new: brands have been around as long as human commerce, differentiating and distinguishing goods and services and making some more valuable than others. Even in the art world, Marcel Duchamp got there first – his autographed urinal Fountain has since become “the most influential artwork of the 20th century” merely because of the addition of Duchamp’s signature and the consequent connection with his fame/infamy (delete as applicable).

While we can’t condone his attitude to other people’s property, we at BrandSoup have a sneaking admiration for Banksy and his cheeky and irreverent take on modern culture and politics. Mind you, we’re still smarting from reading his opinion that “Copyright is for losers”. We sincerely hope he is less cavalier about trade mark rights!

There’s no end in sight to a war which, like one of those interminable border disputes between far-flung nations, has been boiling away since long before BrandSoup was even a twinkle in the sous-chef’s eye.

Since the 19th century, three breweries have claimed the right to call their beer BUDWEISER. The oldest of these, Budweiser Bier Bürgerbräu (founded in 1795 by German-speaking inhabitants of České Budějovice, or “Budweis” as they prefer to call it), plays only a minor part in what follows. The main action has always been between Anheuser-Busch of the USA (who first started brewing their “Budweiser” in 1876) and Budweiser Budvar, founded in 1895 by the Czech-speaking citizens of Budweis (or “České Budějovice” as they prefer to call it).

Almost immediately, the various Budweisers tried to reach some kind of lasting settlement; in the 1930s, they agreed that Anheuser-Busch could use BUDWEISER only in North America, while the two European brewers kept the rights to the Old World markets. As a result, American Bud has to be called “Bud” in some European countries and “Anheuser-Busch B” in others. Budweiser Budvar’s beer, meanwhile, is “Czechvar” in the States but oddly both brews get to call themselves “Budweiser” in the UK and Eire. Confused yet?

The fall of the Iron Curtain opened up fresh markets to all three breweries and sparked off another round of conflicts in various new and exciting jurisdictions. By 2011, the score was standing at something like 88–36 to the Czechs. Furthermore, Budweiser Budvar had managed to win in several crucial territories such as the EU and China – not bad for a business which is outsold 270:1 by its US rival on a pint-by-pint basis. But there are reputed to be a further 110 disputes in hand or pending around the world and, by their own admission, this ongoing global litigation is seriously hampering both parties’ ability to develop and exploit new territories. So why are they still waging this modern Hundred Years’ War?

From one point of view, it could be seen as a principled battle between local traditions/old-fashioned ways and multinational homogeneity/progress and consumer choice. From another, it may be a struggle for truth and justice in the context of brand rights and consumer choice. But increasingly it just looks like an example of how easy it is to lose all sense of proportion once you get sucked into a fight.

Received wisdom suggests that there comes a point in any trade mark dispute (and usually fairly early on) where one or other party realises they’d be better off spending their time and money on a rebrand and a relaunch, rather than continuing to line their lawyers’ pockets. But it’s fair to say that some brands are more valuable than others, and German-style beers may be a good example of this: heavily circumscribed by law and tradition, there is little room for differentiation on grounds of ingredients, flavour or other physical qualities. How then are individual brewers to appeal to their customers?

Being able to trade on the heritage and reputation of a particular region, town or business may be all-important and worth fighting to defend, long after commonsense might suggest otherwise. Certainly Budweiser Budvar see their defence of their trade mark rights as a manifestation of their “right to exist”, casting themselves as a plucky David to Anheuser-Busch’s overmighty Goliath (Anheuser, for their part, profess themselves to be less concerned). Could it be that they have come to define themselves by their struggle and, in a kind of corporate co-dependency, can’t contemplate life without their nemesis?

There’s hope yet: trade mark law is littered with seemingly intractable disputes which have settled, suddenly and surprisingly, as soon as someone comes to their senses – Apple Computers v Apple Corps, WWF (the panda people) v WWF (Hulk Hogan and friends). And if British consumers can distinguish the “crisp, clean taste” of the one from the “full bodied taste” of the other, surely beer drinkers around the world can be trusted to do likewise. But while we’re waiting for peace to break out, make ours a pint of Budweiser, will you…?

Maybe it’s a sign of getting old and boring, but sometimes I miss the old-fashioned analogue world. Everything seemed so simple. If you bought some literature or music, you only really had to worry about the physical medium, not the intangible content. You could give the book away, you could lend the LP to a friend. Ultimately you could pass them all on in your will (I inherited some great books from my dear departed grandmama, even if her collection of polka 78’s wasn’t much to my taste).

Of course, there were still limits to what you were and weren’t allowed to do, but these were by and large commonsense rules and mainly seemed dictated by physical constraints. You weren’t allowed to photocopy your Great Gatsby, or write it out in manuscript, but that was never really going to be an option. And if you needed to apply for permission to recite it in public or adapt it for the stage, that wasn’t an insuperable hurdle either.

It was the same with vinyl. OK, it was technically possible to copy an album to tape, but the steep loss of quality soon made this of limited appeal to anyone other than schoolkids. I don’t recall hometaping ever finally killing music – it may even have helped it along by giving us the chance to listen check out the goods before spending our pocket money on the real thing.

Modern entertainment seems so fraught by comparison. The law hasn’t changed, well, not since 1988. And content is content is content (even if it’s not as good as it used to be). But media have gone digital and this has had huge repercussions: it’s now technically and commercially trivial to run off endless identical copies, with no loss of quality. That’s scuppered the big corporates, certainly for the time being, and has led to a general disinclination among younger generations to pay for anything at all.

And what do you even get for your money? What do you get when you download What Do You Get? More and more, it’s only a personal licence to use, and comes with none of the “transmissibility” we’re used to with old-fashioned physical media.

It’s not a big issue yet, because even early adopters of digital music are still relatively hale and hearty, but can you bequeath your MP3s? You may have seen the rumour last summer about Bruce Willis and his daughters (does that make it a Rumer rumour?) and how he was getting stroppy about not being able to leave them his digital music collection in his will.

Turned out it was one of those silly-season made-up jobs, but the point stands. How can you ensure your descendants get to enjoy The Return of Bruno in the same way you did? What if your licence for your music terminates on your death? What if your grieving family can’t find the password for the little slice of the Cloud which stands as a monument to your artistic sensibilities? Kindle’s t&c’s don’t seem to allow for testamentary disposition. Nor do iTunes’. And there has already been litigation in the USA (where else?) over a family’s right to access a dead son’s Facebook page.

As things stand, someone somewhere may well be within their rights to wipe your Kindle and close your account the minute you turn up your toes. Same goes for your music, and your photos, and your blog entries. No doubt it’s one of those things that will sort itself out in time – the EU or US will probably impose a solution on the rest of us. But in the meantime, possession is 9/10ths of the law, and it’s best to keep your digital stuff where you can see it. In a nice physical form. Bit like a book. Or a CD. Plus ça change…