A consumer shopping in a retail shop does not recall precise labels, fonts, or colour combinations. What they recognise is familiarity, such as a familiar word, a familiar look and feel, which suggests a connection. That familiarity often leads them to assume that the products are associated or are from a common commercial source. That moment of assumption, fleeting, subconscious, and entirely human, is precisely where trademark law intervenes.
In Pernod Ricard India Pvt. Ltd. v. Karanveer Singh Chhabra (2025 INSC 981), the Supreme Court refused an interim injunction against “London Pride” whisky, finding that despite a shared word and broadly similar colour palette, the marks were distinct enough to coexist. The case is as instructive for what the doctrine does not catch as for what it does.
The Doctrine: Confusion Includes Association
Trademark infringement is not limited to situations in which a consumer buys Product B believing it to be Product A. The law has always recognised something more diffuse: confusion can arise when a mark creates an impression of connection, sponsorship, or shared commercial origin, even without any direct substitution. This is the doctrine of likelihood of association, not a separate concept, but an integral dimension of confusion itself.
Sections 11 and 29 of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, reflect this directly. Both provisions read confusion as including association, an acknowledgement that brands occupy space in consumers’ minds, not just on product labels. A mark that quietly borrows another’s goodwill, trading on familiarity without earning it, is just as much an infringement as one that causes direct mistake.
The concept of initial interest confusion recognises that harm can occur at the very first moment of consumer contact, even if the consumer later realises the truth and walks away without purchasing. The deception need not be permanent to be actionable. And critically, the law operates on likelihood rather than proof: courts do not require lost sales, recorded complaints, or confusion at the checkout counter. The intervention is preventive, aimed at protecting both brand value and market clarity before damage becomes measurable.
Chime Financial: The Doctrine Applied
Chime Financial, Inc. v. Registrar of Trade Marks C.A. (COMM.IPD-TM) 64/2024 is a clearer illustration of the doctrine in operation.
Chime Financial, a US-based fintech company, applied to register its mark in India across Classes 9, 35, 36, 41, and 42, covering online banking and financial technology services. The Registrar refused registration under Section 11(1), citing ten earlier marks said to be phonetically or visually similar. The problem was the nature of those marks. They covered sectors such as aircraft and aerospace equipment and electronic security devices, fields with no plausible commercial overlap with fintech.
The Delhi High Court set aside the refusal. The Court held that Section 11(1) requires two cumulative conditions: similarity of marks and similarity of goods or services, producing a real likelihood of confusion or association. Abstract phonetic resemblance, or the mere fact of sharing a trademark class, does not satisfy that test. Relying on Nandhini Deluxe, the Court confirmed that even identical marks may lawfully coexist when the goods or services are genuinely distinct.
The Registrar had treated phonetic similarity as sufficient to raise a bar. The Court refused that approach. Likelihood of association is a market question, not a linguistic one; it asks whether the consuming public for these specific goods would actually draw a connection between these specific marks. When the goods operate in entirely separate commercial spheres, the answer is almost always no, whatever the marks may sound like.
Pernod Ricard: Where the Doctrine Stops
Pernod Ricard tests the doctrine from the other direction. Here, the goods were identical, both parties sold premium whisky, and the marks shared a common word. If the association doctrine were applied broadly, this might constitute a strong case of infringement. The Supreme Court thought otherwise.
The Court applied the anti-dissection rule: marks must be assessed as a whole, as a consumer would encounter them, not broken into components for separate examination. Viewed in full, “Blenders Pride” and “London Pride” were structurally, phonetically, and visually distinct. The word “PRIDE” was the sticking point for the appellants, but the Court found it a generic and laudatory term, publici juris, already used in multiple registered marks across the whisky industry: McDowell’s Pride, Royal Pride, Highland Pride, Pride of India. No single producer could claim it.
Pernod Ricard had not produced consumer surveys, brand recognition studies, or evidence that “PRIDE” had acquired secondary meaning exclusively associated with its products. Without that evidence, the word remained common property. The appellants’ attempt to combine elements from “Blenders Pride” and “Imperial Blue” into a single composite claim was also rejected as a hybrid and untenable pleading. The Court noted that buyers exercise greater care in their purchase decisions, and the average consumer standard is calibrated to the product, not applied uniformly across all goods. That calibration, combined with distinct trade dress and packaging, meant there was no prima facie case for an injunction.
The judgment is not a retreat from the association doctrine. It is a statement of what the doctrine requires: genuine market overlap, an overall resemblance that a real consumer would notice, and marks that have acquired a meaning distinctive enough to warrant protection. Generic words, shared colours, and similar product categories are not, by themselves, enough.
Conclusion
Trademark law is not concerned only with identical copies or blatant deception. Its focus lies deeper, in the grey zones of perception, memory, and association.
Pernod Ricard and CHIME together draw the map. Confusion begins not when the consumer is definitively misled, but when they are made to wonder. That moment of wondering, of plausible connection, however fleeting, is where the doctrine intervenes. But it intervenes precisely, not expansively. It will not convert a shared generic word into a monopoly. It will not extend protection across commercial markets that do not communicate with one another, nor will it grant relief to a party that cannot show its mark has earned distinctiveness.
Written by
Nishmma James
