Talk to Chuck, Trade Like Chuck, or Chuckit?

A recent advertisement caught my ear because it involved financial services offered by a guy named Charles Hughes a/k/a Chuck Hughes and the catchy marketing phrase Trade Like Chuck:

It instantly reminded me of a piece I wrote in 2010 called: Exposing Two-Face Brands. One of the branding truncation examples I wrote about there noted how Charles Schwab exposed a much less formal and more personal and engaging face with the popular Talk to Chuck advertising campaign.

The folks liked it, so Susan Perera and I responded by writing a more in-depth version for Minnesota Business, providing other examples of the trend toward truncation and informality in branding — then, I wrote about Talk to Chuck in yet another version for World Trademark Review:

Apparently the Talk to Chuck campaign was quite successful too. But all good things come to an end, as the campaign was dropped in 2013, in favor of its current tagline: Own Your Tomorrow:

What I wondered was whether Charles Schwab had continued some (even modest) use of the Talk to Chuck tagline — to retain enforceable rights — or whether it simply chucked them out, since Mr. Hughes didn’t seem at all deterred with his apparent introduction of TradeLikeChuck.com in 2016.

Although there still may be valid use of Talk to Chuck that I’m unaware of, the visible signs all seem to point toward abandonment. The TalkToChuck.com domain name was originally registered back in 2005, yet today, it only redirects to the main Charles Schwab website with no visual Talk to Chuck reinforcement, so that mere redirection, shouldn’t constitute bona fide trademark use.

Perhaps even more importantly, searches for “Talk to Chuck” on the Charles Schwab website yield no results: “There are no results for ‘talk to chuck’.” And, each Talk to Chuck federal registration and application was allowed to expire or become abandoned (here, here, and here).

Why didn’t Schwab see some value in taking steps — even modest ones — to avoid abandonment of its federally-registered rights? Do you suppose Mr. Hughes has Schwab regretting that decision?

What if the web traffic to the Charles Schwab financial services site still had meaningful redirection coming from the TalktoChuck.com domain name, would that help establish lingering goodwill?

In the end, to “own your tomorrow” — from a trademark perspective — even when you’ve moved on to a new tagline, it might pay dividends to develop an intentional plan to avoid abandonment.

Otherwise you might as well roll up those rights into a round little wad of paper, and hurl them to your doggie with one of these federally-registered Chuckit! babies (here, here, and here):

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