This article is in response to an interesting letter I received from a florist in Norfolk regarding one of their competitors who happens to by my client.

I recently received a “Cease and Desist” letter from a flower shop in Norfolk Virginia.  Apparently, they had trademarked their city name in combination with the popularly used keyword “Florist”.   I consider this a cheap shot at trying to kill the competition using trademark law for a city who’s name is used in more that one state in combination with the most general term for their industry.  I don’t know how they got approved for the specific term using their city name seeing as how Martha Stewart is having such a difficult time with it.

Regardless of how they got their city name trademarked, they did, which means my client has to remove that exact phrase from their pages.  When I tried to remove it, I found that it actually was not even on the page.  This really got to me because they must be sending these threatening letters out to all flower shops that operate on a national level in hopes that they may catch someone that is using their “name”.

Because I feel that this is such a cheap shot in internet marketing, I feel it is my duty to fight this in the only way I know how, using SEO.  Before this happened, the Norfolk wholesale florist market was of little concern because of the market size but now it has progressed to being the principle of the matter.

In order to make a point back to the company that started this trademark infringement pursuit, I am going to focus my efforts towards my client gaining as much Norfolk flower shop and florist market share as possible.   Through my research I was able to see that a lot of people also search for Norfolk Wholesale Florist in the Norfolk Virginia area as well so I will also be trying to gain market share for that specific phrase as well.

This is not a link scam or a joke, this is really happening. Here is their actual Trademark

http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=l1dn4o.2.1

If you have had a similar run in with a Florist in Norfolk, I would love to hear from you.

Thanks,

Brad Henry

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 5:49 am and is filed under Brad Henry's Post, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.