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Dimitar Trendafilov
Legislation On Ensuring Fair Competition in Trademarks
Summary:
The purpose of developing trademarks as a tool in economic activity and in marketing practice, in particular, is to establish a distinction for the products of its owner, serving both his/her interests and those of consumers as concerns to the absence of delusions and unambiguous awareness of the origin of goods and services. However, how this differentiation is achieved and protected in a regulated way against deliberate or apparently good faith encroachments is the subject of legislation that does not always manage to set clear criteria and at least needs several points of view and interpretations. In this context, the article derives and interprets selected texts from the most important national and international normative acts (such as the Paris Convention, the EU Regulation and the local competition law), and at the end points out an exemplary litigation that arose on the basis of "similarity" to a well-known brand, considered unfair competition.
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Dimitar Trendafilov
Clusters and Communication: Marketing Aspects of Argicultural Practice in Bulgaria
Summary:
This paper focuses on the agricultural business in Bulgaria and the perspectives for its successful development and promotion in the context of global competition and positive aspects of cluster organizations. In the first place, it scrutinizes the problems that the sector has been experiencing since the political and economical changes in 1989 and the new challenges it faces nowadays such as competitive improvement, value added and communication as well as internal business environment and country’s EU membership. Some crucial theoretical points in cluster formation are outlined in order to answer the question why such collaboration is useful and even necessary for the growth of local economy and resources optimization. The second part examines several examples exposed in connection with the local practices in clustering, social responsibility, the so called “cause marketing”, the benefits of active communication as well as cultural and wine tourism development which has been gaining popularity especially among the young generation of consumers.
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Dimitar Trendafilov
Communication properties of brand
Summary:
The article is dedicated to brand as a communication device in marketing practice and, thence, it attempts to define in clearer manner why and how brand serves to companies’ sale objectives, and how could be used more successfully as a tool. The main thesis is that brand deserves the whole responsibility and attention of the management since in the contemporary business environment it is superb, but not one and only, instrument for taking hard-to-copy competitive advantages and it provides the much needed dialogue with consumer, who on her/his side has more and more opportunities to influence brand’s life in the market. Also the most important tasks of brand in terms of communication are listed, and by means of two diagrams its main elements and their functions are illustrated in different perspectives.
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Dimitar Trendafilov
Meme, Brand and Pop-Culture
Summary:
Being a social animal human demonstrates unusual aptitude to imitation which is peculiar to his/her ‘natural’ roots but rather, in a large extend, it is a result of the ‘cultural’ submersion. For that reason the following text makes brief review of the R. Dawkins’ theory of memes in order to apply it later to the contemporary market context and especially in terms of brands. Several examples are given concerning prominent brands as Apple, Doc Martens and some others since they build the argumentation in favor of the thesis that, in principal, brands are among the strongest memes we could encounter in culture and nowadays they take advantage of the highly intensive global communication flow via Internet. Given ideas, behavior and practices of consumption are greatly transferable at least between the limits of certain subculture networks if only there is available powerful enough mechanism to put the meme in motion.
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Dimitar Trendafilov
On Rituals of Hurting and Killing People - the Significance of Some Aggressive Ritual Practices Occurring in Cultures and Cult Movies
Summary:
Rituals are an integrated and important part of common life in societies (even the most complex ones), in fact, they are an essential part of culture as mechanism of sharing information and meaning between its members by means of words, gestures, roles and performances. What makes them different and crucial are first of all their extraordinariness and the enduring imprint they leave on the community consciousness. We could encounter them in different kinds and formats, woven into the texture of life and cultures, as sacred practices, games, parts of narratives (mythological and/or pop-cultural). The following pages are dedicated not especially to the nature of ritual itself but more accurately to those rituals existing across cultures and familiar texts in which human aggression and deadly violence participate as a main element. Furthermore, emphasis is put on the acts of killing or maiming other men in which efficacy goes beyond the brutal murder. The efforts and the tools devoted to the topic are interdisciplinary and probably they would not be fruitful if we examined the ritual from one perspective only. The paper takes two samples from different cultures in which we could observe violent acts not as damaging the community but as sanctioned by. In addition, ritual representations in popular movies are analyzed such as The Godfather, Pulp Fiction and The Passion of the Christ as case studies. The latter are very useful examples uncovering the characteristics and structure of the initiation and/or transformational rituals which includes use of violence and even killing(s).
