Moet & Chandon, and other champagne producers, have adopted the unique method of affixing their trade-marks to the bottom of the corks of their bottles. The trade-mark is not seen, of course, until the bottle has been opened. This method of affixation has been sustained by the courts. The logic of it is that it prevents an unscrupulous retailer from washing the label off a bottle of wine and pasting a spurious label in its place, provided the purchaser knows where to look for the trade-mark.
CHAPTER III
Advertising Characters
The main difference between a trade-mark and an "advertising character" is in the matter of affixation. A trade-mark, to be valid, must be affixed to the goods, while an advertising character is often used only in the advertisements of the product, though most advertisers use their trade-marks also in advertising.
But there is another difference. A trade-mark is inflexible. After having been once adopted and registered, it cannot be changed in design or wording. If changes are made in it, the validity of the trade-mark is vitiated proportionately. On the other hand, all kinds of changes are being constantly made in advertising characters, though advertisers are careful to preserve the main features of a character, after having adopted it, in order that it may be the touchstone of remembrance in the reader's mind.
It has occurred to various advertisers, who have been impressed by the infinite variety of pictures in advertising, that it would be a good idea for them to put some permanent pictorial feature in their advertisements. This feature—a human figure, or a decoration, or a group of figures—serves as an identifying landmark to the voyager in these weltering seas of change. With this principle established and followed year after year in all advertisements of any product, it is feasible to change the entire artistic treatment of the subject from time to time, yet still hold to the symbolic figures which connect, in the reader's mind, all the past advertising with the new series.
This line of reasoning underlies the adoption and use of advertising characters.
An "advertising character"—this is a rather crude term, but it seems to express the idea better than anything else—differs from an advertising illustration in that the character is carried on continuously in the advertising, in some form, while an illustration is dropped for something new.