The basic rule for businesses: always choose a logo that is unique so it can represent you and only you. Logo should act like a unique identifier; a representation of a brand in the eyes of the public. It needs to be distinguishable as it also should be appealing.
This is where the music streaming company Pandora missed its lesson.
PayPal, the company known to provide the popular online payment, is suing Pandora for trademark infringement. It claims that Pandora's 2016 logo redesign is too similar to its own.
According to the lawsuit:
With the similarities, the result is obvious. There are many internet testimonials that indicate people are in fact mistaking Pandora for PayPal.
This "threatens the interests of PayPal's customers and disrupts their user experience". For PayPal, this is a serious since it directly hampers with people's access to the company's services, affecting how the company is performing in the market.
This is why PayPal's legal team is making sure that they include as many examples in its filing - with more than 110 pages of supporting examples of consumer confusion.
What PayPal wants, is Pandora to stop using the logo. PayPal demands Pandora to stop using the logo as it considers tricking customers into mistaking the one service for the other, especially for mobile users.
Pandora has had a great start in its early age. But as mobile users demanded more and competitors are ramping up their efforts, Pandora is struggling. Facing overwhelming competition from Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and other successful streaming platforms, in 2017, Pandora is losing 75 percent of its market value it had in 2014.
With Pandora and PayPal logo to be similar, many are questioning whether PayPal has acquired Pandora. The similarities also made speculations about Pandora's desperate move to profit by piggybacking onto PayPal's success.
What's more, it's also giving Pandora the issue for creativity. Pandora may lose people's trust because as a company, it wasn't thinking out of the box and failed to innovate ethically.
PayPal in attacking Pandora over a logo redesign, means that Pandora needs to spend even more money just to defend itself in court. This is certainly a huge blow as the company is still struggling to stay relevant in the music market.