Sumitomo Tyres Make History with India’s Maiden Smell Trademark Registration

An Indian Intellectual Property historic moment.

We now are in the midst of an Indian business milestone that will forever revolutionize the way we are going to think about brands. The Trade Mark Registry has given a smell a trademark, in the country, the first time ever. The leader of this new trend is the Japanese giant Sumitomo Rubber Industries, commonly referred to as its well-known brand of tyre. They have even managed to trademark a certain smell that can be defined as a floral odour that reminds of roses and it is sprinkled onto their car tyres.

This ruling is a tremendous turning point in the realm of brand protection in India. Historically, trademarks have always been visible, such as a logo, brand name, slogan or even a particular combination of colors. The notion of a smell being owned by a company appeared to be unattainable at a very long period of time since smells are invisible and difficult to describe. Sumitomo has broken this glass ceiling by demonstrating that a scent does work to be a distinct identifier of a product.

The process to this registration was not easy and it entailed complicated legal struggles during a number of years. The Indian Trade Marks Act states that a trademark must be capable of representation in the form of a graph either of which is easily achievable with a logo but insanely difficult with a smell. The registry officials needed to be made to believe that this rose scent was not merely a nice perfume but a clear point of difference that differentiates the tyres of Sumitomo and all the other tyres in the market.

With the grant of this registration, India has become a very elite club of countries that acknowledge non-conventional trademarks. They are marks that transcend the visual, and attract other senses such as hearing or smell. This is a positive step indicating that Indian intellectual property law is changing and getting more contemporary and thus willing to embrace the innovative methods of companies trying to stand out in an already saturated international market.

The Scent of Roses on the Road

You may be asking yourself why a tyre company would want to have its products to smell of a garden of roses. The solution is found in the bitter truth of the business of rubber which is that the production process will produce an unpleasant odor, sometimes strong. Sumitomo rubber industries discovered long ago that covering this smell may be a selling point to their customers. They have been putting this particular fragrance of florals into their tyres since 1995 in order to enhance the customer experience.

The smell is not a random attribute of the product but a well thought-out attribute of the product. It is promoted as a flowery perfume that reminds about the roses, which is now legally secured. This implies that there is not even one other tyre manufacturing company in India that can be selling tyres that smell of roses. By doing so, it would be like they are violating the trademark of Sumitomo, just like they would have violated the logo or brand name of the company.

To the consumer, this smell plays an extremely distinct role which is called by law a source identifier. When a customer enters a tyre shop, and gets to snuff the specific floral scent, he or she is certain that he or she is looking at a Sumitomo product even before he or she sees the name. This immediate identification is what any trademark should be all about, be it the form of a Coca-Cola bottle or the noises of the Netflix intro.

What is peculiar about this instance is that the smell is arbitrary to the product. Tyres do not have a flowery smell, they smell of burnt rubber or chemicals. Since the rose smell has no relation to the use of a tyre, it is legally considered as distinctive. This uniqueness was one of the points that Sumitomo employed to win their case demonstrating that the smell was a preconscious branding decision.

Breaking the Hurdle of Graphical Representation.

The greatest hurdle to the victory of Sumitomo and their history was a legal provision known as graphical representation. According to the law, you should be in a position to draw or print a trademark in a piece of paper in order to be registered into the public register. This formality has seen a refusal of nearly every application of smell trademarks in India in the past.

The legal team of Sumitomo was forced to resort to the use of high science to solve this issue. They joined the team of researchers at Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) at Allahabad. They developed a complex scientific model together that had an ability to map the scent of roses. They decomposed the odor into certain chemical elements and mapped them on a chart of seven dimensions.

This chart quantified different properties of the smell e.g. its sweetness, pungency and minty American songs. Through this, they transformed the invisible smell into a scientific graph that was visible. It gave an objective means by which the Trade Marks Registry could determine precisely what the trademark had to encompass, which met the legal requirement of a graphical representation.

This was a groundbreaking strategy since it abandoned the subjective explanations such as smells nice in favor of facts on the ground. The Registry took this scientific model of the mark in the form of a vector as an acceptable form of representing it. It established a new precedent on how non-conventional marks may be treated in future that science and law can collaborate in solving multifaceted issues of definition.

The Importance of the so-called Sieckmann Criteria.

The Indian authorities used the international legal norms, namely, the so-called Sieckmann criteria, in making such a decision. This is a well-known legal test of the European Court of Justice which set the principles of registering challenging trademarks. According to the test, a graphical representation should be understandable, specific, self-enclosed, readily available, understandable, long-lived and objective.