25th March 2008 :: Identity crisis

What do you do when you want to get in a business but lack the imagination? The imagination I am talking about is not in running the business, but lack in imagination about what you want to call yourself and how do you want to be seen by others. You have good imaginations as far as other things are concerned like what to make, how to price it and to whom and how to sell it. There are countless cases where companies come up aping everything from name to logo of another company. An example of this is the company that made this ball. The name of the company is “Jonex” and no points in guess it was arrived at by changing y to a j in the name of a famous company that used to make same stuff. Now you may wonder why “y” was changed with “j” and not any other letter. The reason could be the name of the entrepreneur or the name of his wife or his kid that starts with a letter j. Or the more likely reason could be that with j, you can still copy the way y was written. Now not only you have a name that is quite similar but a logo that is similar too. What has forced me to think and blog about this is one small thing that is printed on the ball. Apparently the company is an ISO: 9001 company.

Now there are two questions
How can someone form and run a company that apes the name and logo of another company?
Now that they are rich and famous, is the similarity in the name and logo bothering or at least embarrassing them?