A Swiss court sided with Swatch in a dispute with Apple Corporation over similar slogans.
The court ruled that the phrase "Tick Different" is not confusingly similar to the slogan "Think Different" Apple because of her lack of publicity in Switzerland.
The Federal Administrative Court confirmed that Apple did not provide documents to sufficiently support its position on the similarity of advertising phrases. The company was unable to prove that more than 50% consumers associated the phrase "Tick Different" with Apple products, and not swatch. In April 2017, Apple filed a lawsuit against Swatch, claiming that the phrase "Tick Different" used to advertise watches was similar to its old slogan, which was used to support the line of computers between 1997 and 2002.
The slogan was developed in 2015 by Swatch in collaboration with the international Visa payment system to advertise Bellamy watches with an NFC module for contactless payments. Swatch explained that when they came up with the slogan, they were inspired by their own advertising from the 80s “Always different, always new”. The Swatch slogan was later registered in Switzerland and the USA.
Swatch and Apple have already had a number of litigations in the past. In particular, in 2016, the Swiss company won a court case, challenging the application of an American corporation for a patent application for the iWatch brand and proving that the name of the Apple iWatch watch is similar to the iSwatch brand. In 2015, Swatch succeeded in trademarking the phrase "One more thing", which Steve Jobs liked to use at Apple presentations.