“Brand Beckham” and the cost of turning family life into a public product
Brooklyn Peltz-Beckham, the eldest son of David and Victoria Beckham, has announced on Instagram that he’s officially cut all ties with his parents and “Brand Beckham” after making a series of accusations surrounding the Beckhams’ interference with his relationship with his wife Nicola Peltz-Beckham.
Now, I love to hear about celebrity gossip as much as the next person, but bearing in mind that this is a very sensitive family issue and that we’re Scintilla (your favourite IP specialists), not People Magazine, I would like to turn to a key issue highlighted in Brooklyn’s Instagram statement surrounding ownership of the BROOKLYN BECKHAM trade marks.
Control
As referenced in another of our recent blogs, A Dram Shame, personal names are not necessarily as straightforward when it comes to registration of trade marks as one might think. Part of Brooklyn’s statement relates to the control of “Brand Beckham” which extends to ownership of his name.
“Weeks before our big day, my parents repeatedly pressured and attempted to bribe me into signing away the rights to my name, which would have affected me, my wife and our future children,”
“They were adamant on me signing before my wedding date because then the terms of the deal would be initiated. My holdout affected the payday and they have never treated me the same since.”
It is common to refer to “image rights” when protecting a personal brand, but in the UK there is no single legal “image right”; rather celebrities can protect themselves with a range of tools including registered trade marks, copyright and carefully worded commercial contracts.
It’s likely that Brooklyn’s reference to “signing away the rights to my name” relates to a combination of these tools and of course the commercial details are not public. However, what we can see in public are the registered trade marks that are involved.
The UK registered trade mark and its EU equivalent for “BROOKLYN BECKHAM” are registered in a range of different classes, covering a wide range of products and services which you might expect a celebrity to be putting their name behind.
A trade mark registration gives the holder the rights to prevent others from using a brand which is identical or similar as a “badge of origin” in commercial activities relating to the specified goods and services.
So, when you are planning how to maximise and control your personal brand it is a very good idea to register a trade mark to cover the kinds of goods and services that you want to promote, and the registration acts as a critical legal tool for preventing others from piggybacking on your brand.
However, as the Beckhams’ public breakdown demonstrates, care must be taken when building a brand empire across successive generations.
It’s worth noting that that the BROOKLYN BECKHAM registrations are owned by Victoria Beckham, as parent and guardian of Brooklyn Beckham and were applied for in December 2016, just three months shy of Brooklyn’s 18th birthday. Perhaps this is an aspect of the “control” that Brooklyn was complaining about.
Due to Brooklyn refusing to sign away the rights to his name, there will be problems for both sides of the “Brand Beckham” split.
From Brooklyn’s perspective, if he has commercial ambitions to use his name as a brand, he needs to resolve the legal ownership of the BROOKLYN BECKHAM registrations. But he also needs to take into account that Sir David Beckham does own the rights to DAVID BECKHAM in various forms and the word mark for BECKHAM, through his limited company DB Ventures Limited, and these rights could create obstacles to his commercial activities.
From his parents’ perspective, this very public falling out is likely to cause some damage to the BECKHAM brand. The Beckhams, as many celebrities did in the age of glossy magazines and reality TV shows, turned their family life into a product for public consumption and allowed their children to shine in the celebrity spotlight. We have seen the Beckham children on red carpets, in ad campaigns, on television and social media for years. But when the tide turns and the narrative changes within a family unit, the impact on that brand could be catastrophic. PR teams may be in crisis mode right now, trying to right the ship, or they may be relying on it to naturally blow over by this time next week when the gossip machine churns out its next story.
But one thing is for certain, Brooklyn’s statement upends what the public thought they knew about one of the world’s most famous families, and one of the world’s most famous brands.
Closing Thoughts
The Beckhams are not the only celebrity families to proactively apply for marks to protect their children’s names, as Beyoncé and Jay-Z did through BGK Trademark Holdings, LLC in the UK in 2012.
While some kind of protection strategy surely makes sense when building a brand empire, these revelations highlight quite harshly the risks involves when a brand is based on your family.
From the Beckhams’ perspective, only time will tell whether this is a small crack in an otherwise strong foundation, or the start of the collapse of an empire. In the meantime, it is worth bearing these kind of dynamics in mind as you build you own name-based trade mark portfolios.
Scintilla is Where Innovation Thrives
We put you in control of your destiny by organising, optimising, & monetising your intellectual property.