Assignment task: Trademark Law
Zoom Video Communications (ZVC) uses both the word ZOOM and the following logo for their video conferencing services.
Evaluate the distinctiveness of the word ZOOM for video conferencing services. Then do the same for the logo. (Note: In both cases, evaluate distinctiveness as of December 2019.)
The following are some facts that may be relevant to your analysis:
ZVC was founded in 2011 and the Zoom software first distributed in 2013. By December 2019, the service had about 11 million active users and 10 million meeting participants per day, worldwide, with the majority of these being in the United States. More than 90% of those users were corporate users rather than individual users, meaning that their accounts were set up and paid for by their employers. In 2019, ZVC spent about $15 million in advertising, almost entirely directed at potential corporate clients. ZVC's 2019 revenue was $331 million. There was some media coverage of ZVC's April 2019 IPO in the business news, but relatively little coverage of Zoom in media directed at a general audience in 2019.
Some competing services and their corresponding logos include: Face Time, Skype, and Google Meet.