I was reading the Wall Street Journal the other day and was astounded, well actually these days nothing surprises me anymore, that two toothpaste manufacturers are going to war over a graphic picture of a squirt of toothpaste.
Now I’m all about protecting intellectual property, I have plenty of copyrights and trademarks of my own, but this seems insane even to me, a professional marketer.
For the uninitiated, a NURDLE is the apparently correct name for the tiny little perfectly shaped glob of toothpaste shown on the box. In this picture the red, white and blue thingy.
nurdle
n. a grain, pellet, granule, or other small piece of a material, especially as part of a large quantity (such as foam kernels used as packing material); (in pronunciation-based spellings) a nodule; a quantity of a gel or semi-solid; a thing of unknown name (doodad, thingamajig, etc.). Also nerdle. Read More→
I am regularly amazed at how quickly the most ‘corporate’ of companies, never mind us free wheeling, unstructured entrepreneurial companies, can get sucked off track and into the black hole vortex of wasting time by a simple 5 word phrase uttered in a meeting “I’ve got a great idea!”
