Deceptive Products: Consumer Confusion, Secondary Meaning and Dilution

Way back in time, some 30 years ago when Bruce Jenner was famous for having become the 1984 Olympic Decathlon Champion, he appeared in a series of television commercials for Tropicana Premium Pack orange juice. In one of the commercials, he was shown squeezing juice from an orange and pouring it into a Tropicana carton, saying, “It’s pure pasteurized juice as it comes from the orange.” Clearly, the commercial was playing upon Mr. Jenner’s (at the time) chiseled body and hand strength, since few people could take an orange in the palm of their hand and squeeze it, extracting all of its juice.1 The message to be conveyed was that Tropicana, unlike other leading brands, was not made from concentrate. Coca-Cola, which still produces rival Minute Maid, sued.The court found this visual sequence to be false because Tropicana juice was not squeezed from the orange directly into cartons, as the commercial depicted; it was pasteurized and sometimes frozen first. The court also said that Jenner’s qualifying voice-over was insufficient because “pasteurized juice does not come from oranges.” The judge granted an injunction, and the advertising which conveyed this message was removed from the air.