Procter & Gamble Trademarks LOL and WTF

Procter & Gamble Co. is the world’s largest consumer-products company and they’ve filed for trademarks of popular acronyms LOL, NBD, FML and WTF, which it seemingly plans to use in relationship to its cleaning and air freshening products.

Instead of focusing on the obvious question of how companies can acquire the rights to “own” these words, we thought it would be more entertaining to touch on the idea of of using acronyms on product marketing. While appealing to a younger audience is something that every company is trying to do at some point (because eventually you have to), does that mean you should resort to using what amounts to slang to represent your product, company or business? Is this a good idea? No seriously, we’re asking you the readers because we’re not sure.