Don’t get in trouble for misusing the Google Glass™ brand

New branding guidelines for Google Glass™

Google has released a set of branding guidelines regarding its ever-popular Glass™ product. There are several aspects of these guidelines that will affect how your business displays and discusses the brand. For example, Glass is always supposed to be capitalized and should never be talked about in the plural form. You are not permitted to say, “we sell Glasses;” you will have to say, “we carry Glass.” Also, it should not be possessive: “Google Glass’s controls are easy to use,” is not acceptable.

You cannot use Glass icons or assets for any other purpose, such as in physical merchandise that is unrelated to your Glassware or in non-approved Glassware. Glass can never be a part of a company name that produces software, either. Glass is never part of the name of your business. Instead, use “for Glass” and if you use this alongside a logo, “for Glass” must be smaller than the rest of the logo.

Trademarks, hashtags, and more

Glass should always carries a trademark symbol the first time, or the most prominent time, it appears in a publication and whenever possible you should state: “Glass is a trademark of Google Inc.” Google is strongly encouraging the use of the “#throughglass” tag to categorize anything you share, for easy discoverability and aggregation; especially with photos and videos publicly shared on social networking sites. You can also add “sent through Glass” when categorization is not needed; this is especially useful with emails, but not absolutely necessary.

While these guidelines may seem a bit anal retentive to the causal observer, we all know that branding is important. And if you get right down to it, Apple has a similar set of guidelines; even going so far as to ban the use of articles in front of proper nouns, like iPod, iPhone, or iPad. So, you should not say, “the iPhone,” even though it may be grammatically correct, because you need to play by their rules. After all, you would not want someone tampering with your business image, but putting forth content that was not up to your standards and I think Google and Apple are doing the same thing.