00:00Obviously, Aldi is a global business, over 12,500 stores globally. Their approach is
00:07to buy large volumes of inventory, but a very small range. That range is predominantly private
00:14label products. They adopt a phantom brand approach, so they don't call their products
00:19Aldi, they create brands for them. And the other strategy they use is a copycat strategy.
00:25So they make their products almost similar, but slightly different from national products.
00:30So when you're walking through a supermarket, we're not making very large informed choices.
00:34If the product looks like Nutri-Grain, it probably is Nutri-Grain. And that's how it
00:39works well with consumers.
00:41Okay, so why did this particular product packaging sale too close to the wind? And we might be
00:47able to bring up some of these packages while you're talking there and you can point to
00:52which is which.
00:54Yeah, very difficult to choose which is which. What we've seen today is that the court made
01:02a decision that the similarities were obviously too close. Obviously, there is a proportion
01:09of similarity that's enabled. It could be, you know, the colour of the packaging might
01:13be the same. But as soon as you start to play around with fonts, characters, claims, packaging
01:19size, all these things that are telltale of a national branded product, it becomes
01:24a little bit too complex. Obviously, that's what the court found. And therefore it's found
01:30it's fine accordingly.
01:31Yeah, okay, we might bring them up full screen and just point this out for viewers. So the
01:35products across the top, the baby belly bellies. So that's the original product. And the Aldi
01:42product on the bottom is that the baby puffs and that was what the court found was just
01:48too similar. And so what yes, okay, so Gary, can you point out in particular, what what
01:54is just goes too far with the this packaging?
01:58Obviously, the fonts are very similar. As you can see, the word puffs is used across
02:03all the packaging. The characters are a little bit similar. One of the things that Aldi did
02:08do was remove the font that was on the characters belly. So that was a decision that was made
02:14to say, listen, having the font on the characters belly was obviously very, very too close.
02:21So Aldi made the decision to remove it. But still, you know, the white packaging, the
02:25same pack size, similar claims, similar font, similar characters, just far too close to
02:31the wind. And on this occasion, they decided that it was too much of infringement.
02:35But there was also the fact in this case that there was an email. So to what extent does
02:40this legal victory rest on the discovery of this email, asking the designers to use
02:47the rival product as a benchmark?
02:49Yeah, listen, I guess without it, that email in play, Aldi could have very easily claimed
02:56it was a mistake. It was an error of design. They were given their designers specific specific
03:02instructions, which they followed. But on this occasion, they went a bit too far. An
03:07email trail that indicates that the designers were specifically asked to replicate or copy
03:13in some ways the national brand or national product, clearly showed that Aldi had sort
03:19of stepped out of its line to go about designing a product that was almost the same as the
03:26national branded product.
03:28Okay, so let's pretend that you're the Aldi manager now for a moment, and you're getting
03:34your designer to redesign this so it gets past the rules. What could they have done
03:40with the packaging to get it over the line?
03:43Yeah, listen, it could have changed the font size, the font colours, they could have changed
03:47the font itself to a different type of font. They may have changed, you know, the character
03:53to even further, maybe moving away from a white packet to a slightly different colour
03:58packet may have avoided it. But ultimately, we start to play with intellectual property
04:03and brands that look very similar. It's a bit of a grey space. And I think probably
04:10many of your viewers have wandered through an Aldi store and looked at some of the products
04:15and gone, gee, that looks very similar to what I normally buy when I go to one of the
04:19big two supermarkets. And ultimately, that's designed to connect with customers. You know,
04:24in a supermarket, we're not making very, you know, highly involved decisions. We're grabbing
04:29the same products we always grab. So if the product looks similar to what we would normally
04:33buy in a large shopping centre or in a large supermarket, it's very easy to make that decision.
04:39And so what are the lessons from Aldi for this, apart from not sending such explicit
04:45emails?
04:46Yeah, that's obviously one of the lessons. But ultimately, at the end of the day, I mean,
04:51the question comes down to does this have an impact on consumers? Will consumers trust
04:55Aldi any less? And we've certainly seen a lot of discussion over the last 12 to 18 months
05:00about distrust in supermarkets. Aldi is certainly in the top 10 of trusted supermarkets. This
05:06is obviously one case of many products that they sell where they've just gone over the
05:11threshold of IP and they've obviously, you know, will wear the penalty, whatever penalty
05:17that's going to be.
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