Protecting brand languagePreserving brand governance under real-world constraints
The brief
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At the organization's annual flagship conference, the membership team ran live interviews, asking attendees why they were members. The chosen framing, "Why do you [Org]?", using the organization's trademarked acronym as a verb, was picked live because it was short and catchy. The team briefed it in as a full testimonial campaign: hero video, static social quote cards, and a hashtag they planned to reuse as the template for every future testimonial campaign.
The challenge
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The organization's name is a registered trademark and, by trademark usage rules, can only function as a noun — never a verb or adjective.
Publishing a nationwide campaign using it as a verb wasn't just an internal style slip; it risked signaling to external parties such as press, partner organizations and regulators that the trademark could be used that way, a form of trademark dilution. The membership team had no idea the issue existed; they were already invested in the headline by the time I saw the brief.
Complicating things further, the footage was shot once, on location, at a conference that only happens annually. Reshooting wasn't logistically or financially realistic, and doing it later would have meant scripted delivery.
The approach
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At kickoff, rather than reject the headline outright and derail the call, I proposed building the testimonials under a placeholder headline while I confirmed the trademark question.
Immediately after, I looped in the global Head of Brand and the design director directly. What followed was email back-and-forth: Brand shared longer, "approved" alternative phrasing, and the membership team pushed back that it wasn't catchy enough. I proposed "I'm an [Org] member because..." as a middle path, which Brand approved in a follow-up call.
On execution, we cut every live instance of the interviewer saying the disputed phrase, replacing it with on-screen text framing ("I'm an [Org] member because...") before cutting to members' unscripted answers, preserving the authentic footage while removing the trademark risk entirely. The static social assets followed the same framing, so none of the original material went unused.
Impact
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My headline became the template for every subsequent testimonial campaign the membership team ran. "Check with Brand before locking a headline" became standard practice coming out of this project. Both the global Head of Brand and the global creative team lead publicly recognized the save.