Discounter Lidl has accused Tesco of ripping off its blue and yellow emblem for promoting its Clubcard Prices logo, according to media reports.
The retail chains are set to spend approximately £2.35 million (€2.7 million) in court fighting the dispute.
According to Lidl, the yellow circle with red border on the blue background is a ‘wordless’ trademark' and seeks to ban Tesco from using it.
It claims that shoppers in the UK associate the emblem with Lidl and its associated companies.
Tesco said in its response that the yellow circle trademark is 'a figment of Lidl’s legal imagination’, according to the report.
'Customer Perceptions'
On Monday, the London High Court said that Lidl may use a survey of customer perceptions of the emblem as evidence.
Tesco noted that this would lead to additional legal costs of £500,000 (€583,713.6).
The discounter told the court that in its survey, numerous respondents associated the blue and yellow background with Lidl.
Last year, Lidl went court claiming that Tesco’s marketing bore too much resemblance to its own branding.
Elsewhere, Germany's Schwarz Group, which owns the Lidl and Kaufland brands, reported sales of €133.6 billion across its operations in 2021, up from €125.3 billion the previous year.
Recently, Britain's advertising regulator banned six adverts for Tesco's plant-based products, saying the supermarket group's claims regarding their positive benefits to the planet had not been substantiated and were likely to mislead.
© 2022 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Dayeeta Das. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: European Supermarket Magazine.
