Trademark is for Trust
The chairman of the board of a manufacturing company recently asked me to describe as simply as possible the difference between a patent and a trademark. I said that a patent protects an idea, while a trademark is the sign of trust between a seller and buyer. When customers see the company logo, they trust the quality of what they are buying.
When that trust becomes threatened, some companies strive even harder to strengthen the relationship with their customers. Domino’s Pizza exhibits a good example with its new television and website campaign to publicly acknowledge its mistakes and correct them, http://www.pizzaturnaround.com/. By chance last week, a friend shared her e-mail to the local Domino’s Pizza store manager on Facebook, criticizing the stone-cold, mushroom-less pizza that arrived more than 1 hour late. Within a few days, her friends read the store manager’s apology and effort to make amends with a gift certificate. Trust will finally be renewed when my friend opens the box with a red, white and blue domino with steaming hot pizza, slathered with mushrooms.
The trademark is the tangible sign of that trust. A lot goes into creating the relationship of trust, for Domino’s- a complete change of the company’s pizza recipe, an expensive ad campaign, and the individual attention of store managers across the country. Once that trust is established, the trademark is a very valuable asset.
To the chairman of the board, I suggest, know which of your trademarks are essential to the relationship with your customers and protect them as some of your most important assets.
Trademark ANALYTICS
“Analytics” is a popular buzz word that refers to making data comprehensible, most notably captured in the popular search engine optimization tool, Google Analytics. Google Analytics gives you different ways to measure everything you might want to know about traffic at your web site.
Data of all kinds is exploding around us. The challenge is to derive meaning from it, otherwise it’s useless.
One of the best examples of analytics is Billy Beane’s (general manager of the Oakland Athletics since 1997) predictive use of data to win ball games. The baseball specific form of analytics is ‘sabermetrics’ (Society for American Baseball Research-metrics). By measuring objective evidence, for example OPS (on-base plus slugging), Beale gains insight to help his team win games.
Trademark data is no different: lists of marks, dates, registrations numbers, country codes, classes etc… Typically, the major focus has been to avoid missing deadlines for renewals or responses due. But analyzing the data has been limited because of how its been been stored: in paper files in cabinets, hard to read docket reports, or excel spreadsheets.
MapWise software changes the game by bringing the power of analytics to trademark management. It goes beyond docketing to give the owner many ways to view and analyze a trademark inventory (no matter how small or large), to gain insight, avoid risk and achieve business goals. MapWise analytics offers insight in how to:
- Seek broader protection for your most important logo, and drop registrations for seldom used ones.
- Save money by not renewing the U.S. registrations for inessential filings out side of your primary business.
- Fill gaps in coverage in key countries (China and CTM) where competitors could grab them.
Here’s to both analytics and the arrival of spring baseball!
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MapWise trademark technology- be smart and save money
At the University of Michigan Law School Sesquicentennial this fall, Prof. J. J. White introduced a panel of Intellectual Property professors, noting how technology has changed legal research. Lawyers used to spend hours searching through books to find the law, but they now have it at their fingertips in a fraction of the time.
While technology has fundamentally changed legal research, it has been slow to take hold in other areas. Paper files and home-made spreadsheets are still the common tools of the trade in corporate legal departments. Until recently, the legal department of a bio-tech company with $3.5 billion in sales had only one IT person.
The management of trademark portfolios is no exception. Companies, small and large, rely on paper files or spreadsheets which are inefficient, prone to containing risky data errors, without offering an analytical overview.
Change is in the wind. The current recession has driven home corporate counsel’s need to reduce outside counsel fees and use technology to make smart business decisions.
Martha D. Arthos, a lawyer and IT expert in corporate legal technology confirms this, “Technology in corporate law departments continues to evolve. The most important recent trend for corporate law departments is analytics because it enables the general counsel to parse through volumes of data and make smarter decisions. Software is no longer just a tool for greater efficiency and improved quality, it is vital to key business decision-making.”
Manage Your Trademark Portfolio Strategically
Tis the season to give. The perfect gift delights and continues to remind you of the giver’s loving care. The perfect gift keeps on giving.
Isn’t that what a trademark does? It’s an asset with the potential to be valuable indefinitely, being used over and over again, often increasing in value with age and use. In this respect, it’s unlike most other corporate assets (except trade secrets). The inventory of tangible assets is meant to be depleted as they are sold e.g. cars or computers when sold offer a one-time contribution to the bottom line. Patents and copyrights by statute expire.
But a trademark has the potential to live forever, as long as it’s properly used and renewed. This makes it potentially very valuable. Long after any patent covering the active ingredient in TYLENOL expired, this well known mark remains valuable by continuing to distinguish Johnson & Johnson’s headache cure from those of its competitors.
The significant value is true of all the famous marks especially on view during the holiday season: the double C on the Chanel handbags, the Tiffany blue on its boxes, and Burberry plaid on raincoats. Good marks don’t wear out, in fact their value increases over time. They are assets worth taking care of and protecting.
Which brings us to slogan, THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING. It was registered as a United States trademark in 1927 by RCA’s predecessor and recently expired. In Canada, it is still a registered mark owned by Thomson Multi Media for phonographs and records. It is a wonderful slogan that captures in suggestive language the gift of playing music over and over.
May the magic of giving be with you this holiday season!
One reason why brands (and trademarks) are so important in our economy now.
Standing in the middle of the aisle of any large grocery store tells you immediately why the product name on the cereal box is necessary to distinguish that box from all the others and to capture the customer’s attention. Large consumer product companies recognize that their company and product names (their brands) and their legal underpinnings (trademarks) are essential to their business. A great deal of sophisticated marketing goes into getting the customer to see the distinctive yellow Cheerio® box that advertises healthy eating and which is strategically placed at the end of the aisle at eye level.
But the headline this week that Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving when shoppers traditionally hit the stores has turned into Black Monday, with shoppers preferring to shop for bargains and buy on-line, tells us what we already know. While some customers love to visit stores and browse catalogs, many customers are doing comparison shopping and buying on-line.
Because the Internet is our global marketplace, brands are increasingly important. Every merchant (who does not rely exclusively on street traffic) needs a distinct identity that customers can find on the Internet. The essence of that distinct commercial identify is its name, either as the name of the store or a product that search engines locate when the customer types in her search request. That name is the gateway to the website where the merchants sells its products.
Brands are essential to the start-up, trying to get a foothold in the marketplace. In talking with many entrepreneurs in Madison, Wisconsin, they all recognize that a critical first step is to have a memorable and distinctive name, preferably identical to its URL, in order to create customer recognition whether they sell on the Internet or not. The names of cereals in the grocery aisle (Cheerios, Special K, Raisin Bran, Golden Crisp), are relatively ordinary in my humble view compared to the names of successful current start-ups (YouTube, Twitter, Hulu) which are novel and fun. I think the reason is that new companies know that they need a name that is more clever, more distinctive and ultimately more memorable to gain crucial customer recognition needed to market their product to today’s customers. So when the customer is sitting alone at her computer and is not bombarded with all the colorful boxes in a grocery store aisle, she will remember to type that brand name into the search box.
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