Intellectual property

The proceedings concerned registration as a mark for the word sign “Jambo Afrika”. The General Court of the European Union held that the global assessment of the likelihood of confusion should, as regards the visual, phonetic or conceptual similarity of the marks in question, be based on the overall impression which they created, bearing in mind, in particular, their distinctive and dominant components. The perception of the marks in the mind of the average consumer of the goods or services in question played a decisive role in the global assessment of that likelihood. In that respect, the average consumer normally perceived a mark as a whole and did not proceed to analyse its various details. Further, where a sign consisted of both figurative and word elements, it did not automatically follow that it was the word element which should always be considered to be dominant. Furthermore, assessment of the similarity between two marks meant more than taking just one component of a composite trade mark and comparing it with another mark. On the contrary, the comparison should be made by examining each of the marks in question as a whole, which did not mean that the overall impression conveyed to the relevant public by a composite trade mark might not, in certain circumstances, be dominated by one or more of its components. It was only if all the other components of the mark were negligible that the assessment of the similarity could be carried out solely on the basis of the dominant element. That could be the case, in particular, where that component was capable on its own of dominating the image of that mark which members of the relevant public kept in their minds, such that all the other components were negligible in the overall impression created by that mark.