Brief
With 70 ultra-premium hotels, restaurants and nightclubs across France and now the world, Paris Society is revolutionising the way its guests experience hospitality. But with rapid growth also comes challenges, not least ensuring individual venue names can be scaled into protected international brands. In 2022, Paris Society came to Nucleus to resolve some issues it had with some of its most famous names, starting with CoCo, a famous Parisian restaurant at L’Opéra Garnier, known for its two syllable name 'which sounds like a champagne bubble, a mix of chic and laughter'. The problem we faced was the name was much loved and known, but its use infringed another's trade mark. We were tasked with retaining its spirit, but making the name distinctive and protectable.
Solution
Creating great brand names always comes with challenges, and those challenges increase once a brand earns its place in the spotlight. Infringing existing trade mark rights sometimes doesn't become a problem until you enter the spotlight, but then it can become a very big problem indeed. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it really does pay to rigorously screen and validate brand names at the outset, particularly if an existing trade mark owner has wider reputational rights than a few specific business classifications.
Paris Society was keen to retain the succinct beauty of the CoCo name, but ensure it could be protected in future. We addressed these requirements by identifying sufficiently distinctive pre-fixes, while retaining the original CoCo name as a suffix. This approach would avoid confusion with existing marks as long as the pre-fix was sufficiently distinctive, but which pre-fix? Furthermore, the new name needed to look and sound as good as the original name in French and English, as well as retain the sense of sophisticated glamour.
Out of twenty or more candidates, we recommended ‘Beau CoCo’ which satisfied all the required criteria, passed trade mark screening and added only one syllable loaded with additional meaning to support the restaurant’s brand proposition. The trade mark attorneys considered this sufficiently distinctive and protectable in all the key classes and geographies, and the marketing, creative and management teams all engaged positively with the solution.
Results
CoCo was rebranded Beau CoCo in early 2024, retaining its shining reputation as one of Paris’ most glamourous dining venues. The new name allowed for an easy brand transition, because the playful graphic identity could be retained.