There has been a distinctly New Zealand flavour to some recent developments at McLaren.<\/p>\n
The British supercar manufacturer has reportedly applied to register REMUERA and MURIWAI as trade marks in the United Kingdom and Europe. The names are not random. Remuera is the Auckland suburb in which Bruce McLaren grew up and where his parents, Les and Ruth McLaren, operated their service station and workshop. Muriwai was where the young Bruce McLaren competed in an Austin Ulster prepared by the family and began his motor-racing career.<\/p>\n
At about the same time, McLaren unveiled a new corporate identity. Its new word mark is specifically based on the lettering which appeared above the McLaren family service station in Remuera. McLaren says that its designers went back through the archives and that the new identity draws on Bruce McLaren’s earliest years in New Zealand.<\/p>\n
It makes for an interesting intellectual property story when viewed from this side of the world.<\/p>\n
There is no doubt about Bruce McLaren’s place in the McLaren story. He was a remarkable New Zealander who founded Bruce McLaren Motor Racing in 1963. The racing organisation that bears his name unquestionably traces its history back to him.<\/p>\n
But some care is required when the story moves from McLaren Racing to McLaren Automotive. McLaren’s own corporate website describes McLaren Automotive as \u201cFounded in 2010\u201d and based in Woking, Surrey. Bruce McLaren had by then been dead for 40 years, having died in 1970.<\/p>\n
There were, of course, earlier McLaren road-car businesses and projects. McLaren Cars dates from the Ron Dennis era and produced the McLaren F1. Bruce himself also had road-car ambitions. McLaren quotes him as saying in 1969 that he hoped the company would eventually make a high-performance road car. That ambition was realised only much later, first through the limited-production McLaren F1 and then, under McLaren Automotive, through the MP4-12C. The latter was unveiled in 2009 and entered production in 2011, four decades after Bruce’s death.<\/p>\n
But describing Bruce McLaren simply as the \u201cfounder\u201d of today’s McLaren Automotive rather telescopes several quite different corporate histories into one convenient narrative. That distinction becomes more interesting when history stops being merely history and starts becoming brand property.<\/p>\n
The new McLaren word mark provides a particularly striking example. McLaren says expressly that:<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore McLaren became a marque recognised around the world, it was a family name painted above a Service Station in Remuera, New Zealand. Those original letterforms inspire our new Wordmark, reimagined for a new era.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, a sign once identifying a family service station in Auckland has become the inspiration for the international branding of a British luxury automotive business.<\/p>\n
There is nothing inherently objectionable about that. McLaren is the family name, Bruce McLaren plainly established the racing business from which the modern brand derives, and the historical connection is genuine. But it illustrates something IP lawyers encounter regularly. History, reputation and intellectual property are not necessarily the same thing.<\/p>\n
An historical association can be shared by a family, a community, a place and, ultimately, a country. A trade mark, by contrast, is an instrument of exclusivity. Its purpose is to give its owner enforceable rights in a sign in relation to particular goods or services. That makes McLaren’s next step particularly interesting.<\/p>\n
The service-station lettering is not the only New Zealand symbol being carried into McLaren’s new global identity. McLaren also says that the Heritage Shield and the \u201cSpeedy Kiwi\u201d will remain part of its brand world, expressly describing them as honours to the earliest chapters of the McLaren story and as rooted in Bruce McLaren’s New Zealand heritage.<\/p>\n
The kiwi was present from the beginning. The original Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Team badge placed a kiwi within a shield, against a green-and-white chequered background. A later, more aerodynamic version became known as the Speedy Kiwi. What began as a straightforward declaration of the founder’s nationality has therefore become another portable piece of corporate iconography, capable of appearing on cars, clothing, merchandise and branding far removed from New Zealand.<\/p>\n
Again, the legal position is not especially mysterious. A stylised kiwi device can function as a trade mark, and McLaren has long used and protected versions of it in the United Kingdom. The more interesting question is conceptual. The kiwi is not merely an arbitrary animal chosen by the business. It is a national symbol, and McLaren’s reason for using it is precisely the New Zealand identity of Bruce McLaren. The commercial value of the device therefore lies in an association with this country which the modern British automotive company otherwise possesses only indirectly.<\/p>\n
The new identity packages the elements together: lettering taken from a Remuera service station, a Speedy Kiwi derived from Bruce’s nationality, and proposed trade marks for REMUERA and MURIWAI. Each element has an authentic historical explanation. Collectively, however, they show the modern McLaren organisation assembling a distinctly New Zealand vocabulary for use in its international brand. The kiwi has, in effect, travelled to Woking with the McLaren name.<\/p>\n
McLaren Automotive has applied in the UK to register the word marks REMUERA and MURIWAI. Reports identify the applications as UK00004449264 and UK00004449263 respectively. The applications extend across a surprisingly broad range of goods and services. McLaren has not announced that either will actually become the name of a production vehicle. One might, in any event, question whether New Zealanders would be entirely comfortable driving a \u201cRemuera\u201d anywhere outside Remuera itself.<\/p>\n
From a conventional trade mark perspective, there is nothing especially unusual about seeking protection for a geographical name. Whether it is registrable depends upon the mark, the goods and services, the territory and the applicable statutory tests. Registration does not in any event confer ownership of a word in the abstract.<\/p>\n
But there is a further dimension here which is much more apparent from New Zealand.<\/p>\n
Remuera and Muriwai are New Zealand place names. More importantly, they are M\u0101ori names with histories which long pre-date Bruce McLaren, motor racing and the McLaren family’s service station.<\/p>\n
That point has already attracted attention. Ng\u0101ti Wh\u0101tua chief executive Ng\u0101rimu Blair reportedly said that the iwi had not initially been consulted and observed:<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are our names, and we need to be part of that conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n
McLaren subsequently said that it \u201cdeeply respects\u201d New Zealand’s cultural heritage and recognised the importance of engagement where cultural, historical and local considerations arise. The same reporting records that McLaren said it had engaged with New Zealand diplomatic representatives and that introductions to local experts and Ng\u0101rimu Blair had been facilitated.<\/p>\n
That is perhaps where the conventional trade mark analysis and the New Zealand perspective begin to diverge.<\/p>\n
If equivalent applications were made in New Zealand, the Trade Marks Act 2002 would bring M\u0101ori cultural considerations directly into the examination process.<\/p>\n
Section 17(1)(c) provides that the Commissioner must not register a trade mark if its use or registration would, in the opinion of the Commissioner, be likely to offend a significant section of the community, including M\u0101ori. Section 178 establishes the M\u0101ori Trade Marks Advisory Committee, whose statutory function includes advising the Commissioner whether proposed use or registration of a trade mark comprising or appearing to derive from a M\u0101ori sign, including text and imagery, is likely to be offensive to M\u0101ori.<\/p>\n
That does not mean that M\u0101ori words or place names cannot be registered as trade marks in New Zealand. They plainly can. Nor does consultation itself determine registrability. But the New Zealand legislation recognises something important which is easy to overlook when intellectual property is viewed solely through the orthodox concepts of distinctiveness and consumer confusion: some signs have significance independently of the trader seeking to monopolise them.<\/p>\n
That seems particularly apposite when an overseas company seeks exclusive commercial rights in M\u0101ori place names because those places form part of the childhood story of a New Zealand-born historical figure with whom the company identifies.<\/p>\n
Taken individually, none of this is especially remarkable. Bruce McLaren was born in Auckland. His parents ran a garage in Remuera. He began competing at Muriwai. He went overseas, founded a racing team and created one of motorsport’s great names. The modern McLaren organisations are entitled to celebrate that history.<\/p>\n
Taken together, however, the recent developments are more interesting. The modern automotive company says that it was founded in Britain in 2010. Yet its latest branding reaches back to a New Zealand service station which disappeared as a McLaren family business decades earlier. Its new visual identity appropriates, in the neutral IP sense of taking and adopting, the appearance of that business’s sign. And it is now seeking trade mark rights in the names of two New Zealand locations associated with Bruce’s youth. McLaren’s own explanation says that its designers deliberately went back through the shared Racing and Automotive archives, from \u201cBruce’s earliest years in New Zealand\u201d, to construct the new identity. The connection is therefore being developed deliberately as a contemporary branding asset.<\/p>\n
That is clever brand management. But it also raises a worthwhile question: how far can a multinational business proprietary-ise the history surrounding its founder? The company’s connection with Bruce McLaren<\/em> is obvious. Its claim on McLaren<\/em> as a motor-racing and automotive brand is formidable. Its relationship with Remuera and Muriwai is necessarily rather different. Those places are part of Bruce McLaren’s story. But Bruce McLaren is also part of their story. Neither starts nor ends with the company which now bears his surname.<\/p>\n That distinction is worth maintaining. A registered trade mark for REMUERA would not mean that McLaren owned Remuera. Nor would registration of MURIWAI transfer any cultural or historical ownership of that name to a British car manufacturer. Trade mark rights are territorial and defined by the goods and services for which protection is obtained.<\/p>\n But trade marks do something powerful nonetheless. They transform language into commercially enforceable rights. That is why provenance matters. And it is why engagement with the communities from which culturally significant names originate should occur before, rather than after, the filing of applications designed to turn those names into proprietary commercial assets.<\/p>\n There is an irony in all this. Bruce McLaren left New Zealand as a young racing driver. The businesses carrying his name became thoroughly international and, in the case of today’s McLaren Automotive, British-based. McLaren itself says the automotive business dates from 2010. More than half a century after Bruce’s death, the modern organisation is now travelling in the opposite direction, back down Remuera Road and out to Muriwai, looking for the next pieces of its global brand.<\/p>\n As a branding exercise, it is beautifully constructed.<\/p>\n As an intellectual property exercise, viewed from New Zealand, it is rather more complicated.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There has been a distinctly New Zealand flavour to some recent developments at McLaren. The British supercar manufacturer has reportedly applied to register REMUERA and MURIWAI as trade marks in the United Kingdom and Europe. The names are not random. Remuera is the Auckland suburb in which Bruce McLaren grew up and where his parents,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":9500,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"class_list":["post-9499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trade-marks","insight-resource-articles"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIP rights are not ownership of history<\/strong><\/h5>\n