Corporate Colors in Trademark Registration – commentary for Vedomosti

Russian companies have increasingly begun competing for corporate colors when registering trademarks. Yandex and Tochka Bank are laying claim to similar shades of purple, while Zolotoye Yabloko and OTP Bank want to register a lime-green color. This follows from trademark applications for 2025 submitted to Rospatent and published in the agency’s official bulletins, as noted by Vedomosti.

According to patent attorney and managing partner of Zuykov and partners Sergey Zuykov, companies’ interest in registering color designations as trademarks is linked to the fact that color schemes are easier to promote. If a color designation is registered as a trademark, it can be monetized through franchise and license agreements—i.e., franchisees will pay for the right to use the color.

For example, according to Maxim Panyak, founder and co-owner of Zolotoye Yabloko, by filing an application to register the lime-green color (Pantone 389C), the company plans, among other things, to combat fraudsters who use the brand’s colors and attributes for their own purposes.

At the same time, registering color trademarks in Russia is quite difficult. Rospatent initially considers a color or color combination to be a designation lacking distinctiveness—meaning that consumers do not understand it as a trademark of a particular manufacturer, Zuykov explains. The applicant company must prove that consumers consistently associate a specific color with a particular product or service of a specific company. In addition to large-scale advertising campaigns, which are part of proving acquired distinctiveness, rights holders also submit to Rospatent sales contracts for goods using the color scheme, data on advertising expenditures, results of public opinion surveys, and so on. For example, in May 2025, Zolotoye Yabloko conducted a survey jointly with VTsIOM, according to which 73% of respondents identified the lime-green color as a recognizable attribute of the cosmetics retailer.

Large companies are accustomed to filing trademark applications and registering trademarks very broadly. However, a color combination can be registered as a trademark only for those goods or services for which the combination has become known to consumers, Zuykov notes. Yandex and Tochka Bank, as well as Zolotoye Yabloko and OTP Bank, filed applications covering a large number of goods or services. But the companies are not competitors with each other. That means that, in principle, all of them may obtain rights to the color combination if they can convince Rospatent that consumers associate the color scheme specifically with their company, he believes.

Source: Vedomosti