The (dis) Honest Company - A PR Disaster

I really like watching PR disasters unfold. Perhaps it's a morbid fascination, but it's interesting seeing companies get so wrapped up in themselves that they don't realise what damage they are doing.

Right now, The Honest Company (a Jessica Alba founded company selling expensive but apparently safer baby products) is taking on The Honest Toddler (a hilarious blog and twitter feed written from the perspective of an indignant toddler).

The Honest Toddler has applied for trademark protection and been given provisional approval. However the Honest Company is claiming foul because they registered honesttoddler.com before The Honest Toddler started up. However from my understanding of IP law this case is pretty flimsy since a domain name does not equal a trademark and the Honest Company have never traded commercially under this name. An unfortunate part of IP law is that if you don't aggressively defend your trademark, you will lose rights to it. Of course, that usually seems to involve aggressively attacking anyone that comes remotely close. Or at least those without the legal budget to fight back. The Honest Company is claiming they are friendly and doing what they must, and have "generously" offered to lease the Honest Toddler's name back to them for free for 1 year, after which time they must cease using it. But this doesn't seem very honest or friendly to most people.

All in all, it seems like one of those situations where the big company is listening too much to their legal team and not considering the bigger picture and what they stand to lose compared to any potential gains. The flood of comments on The Honest Company's Facebook page will give you an idea of the amount of negative publicity this has generated.  It seems like a lot of big companies still act like they did before the rise of social media, where they could just get away with ignoring negative feedback and push their positive message hard through advertising. However times and changed and consumers have a lot more choice over what treatment and advertising they will put up with. Hopefully the Honest Company will see some reason soon.

Timeline of events from The Honest Toddler
Statement of events from The Honest Company