Wall Street has claimed that Coca Cola has lost it's strategic vision. Profits are falling. Market share is tumbling. Contamination scares frighten Europe. And the stock price is dropping.
What's a company to do? Why attack and totally alienate it's most loyal fans, of course! At least that's what one fan group found out when they decided to build a website to promote their hobby of collecting vintage Coca Cola memorabilia.
In a move similar to 20th Century Fox's attack on Buffy Fans and Viacom's attack on Star Trek Fans (story in "the Wave" in this issue) , Coca Cola has decided that protecting their copyright is more important than building their brand loyalty.
A group of senior citizens registered the domain name www.vintagecocacola.com and set about building pages that displayed many of the items from their member's collections, providing the Coca Cola company with some terrific free promotion.
But, the site's operators received a "cease and desist" letter, along with a $100,000 lawsuit from Coca Cola's lawyers. The letter alleges that the site was using the registered trademarks of The Coca Cola Company in "an unauthorized manner" and that the domain name "vintagecocacola.com" was also a breach of their trademark.
Well, web netizens are the big losers once again as the senior citizens pulled off all the photographs and the wonderful promotion of the history of Coca Cola. Instead visitors to the site will now find copies of the letter sent by Coca Cola and the site operator's response, along with a campaign to protect domain name owners.
A very thorough story on the domain name issue is found in our article Cybersquatting Bill Threatens FREE SPEECH and Small Internet Webmasters.
Link here to CNet to find an excellent article on the Coca Cola Battle.
