Who owns the colour green for beer packaging? Is it: a) Heineken, b) Grolsch, c) Carlsberg or d) none of the above?
Nobody ‘owns’ colours (even Cadbury has lost court cases), but it can pay to adopt a monolithic brand colour policy from the start, and then do everything you can to reinforce it.
In France supermarkets generously help to build a wall of Activia green (with a few ‘guest’ bricks) by using a matching shelf colour. In the UK the brand makes excellent use of trays printed green on the inside and outside to mark its territory.
Dolmio also presses its trays into service to good effect, but of course the key to success in all ‘wall’ strategies is retailer collaboration ‐ it’s far less effective being spread out all over the store.