The Cisense Blog

Top Five Ways Trademark Filings Can Boost Competitive Intelligence

2008-10-07T19:20:24Z

Top Five Ways Trademark Filings Can Boost Competitive Intelligence

When we hear the word ‘trademark’, we often think of catchy jingles and lawsuits. But, trademark filing data can be a marketer’s friend. It can offer big clues about what your competition is up to and can illustrate new marketing trends. As a marketer, keeping an eye on the competition and tracking trademark filing activities in your industry can be an effective way to make sure you’re in the loop. Here are five reasons to incorporate monitoring trademark filings into your overall marketing strategy.

Trademark filings usually predate product launches or web mentions—sometimes by months, even years. In most cases the first action item after a company decides on a new brand or campaign is to file a trademark. Getting a “heads-up” on competitors’ trademarks gives you time to consider your next move. Since trademark filings are accompanied by a Goods & Services description, you can pick-up small hints as to what the new product might be—is it a spin-off of a preexisting product or something new and different that your company hasn’t considered?
Trademarks offer a great way to gauge new trends. By tracking trademark filings over a period of time, you can follow new industry buzzwords or pick-up on product variations that seem to be gaining in popularity. Trend watching with trademarks piggy-backs onto all the market research your competitors have already done!
Trademark filings can tip you off to new players in your industry. Aside from monitoring trademark filings to see what your existing competitors are up to, a search by industry can reveal new companies entering the market that you should be on the lookout for.
Measure Activity. As a marketer, you’re responsible for market research and keeping an eye on the competitive landscape. That can be tricky. Monitoring competitor’s filings and comparing them with historical filing servers as a good metric of you competitor’s overall financial and creative health. How many trademarks do they usually file within a given year? How does this year compare with previous years? Of course, filing a trademark is not a huge investment, and some companies have filed trademarks and then gone out of business shortly afterwards. But, more often than not, seeing a new filing indicates of a sign of life.
Monitoring trademark filings easily integrates into existing Competitive Intelligence activities. Ad-hoc methods of keep track of your competitors’ latest products (clippings, bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc.) is involved, time consuming and reactive when it should be proactive. Trademark filing dates, along with categorization and owner information, are designed to be archived and so are easy to attain, read and interpret. Whether you need to get the “big picture” or are searching for targeted information, mining trademark filings for competitive intelligence should be part of your marketing strategy.

Does Your Competitor Still Have a Pulse?

2008-09-26T14:13:50Z

Is your competitor still ticking?

While glancing through recently filed trademarks, sometimes you’ll come across a trademark filing from your competitor who seems to have been dormant for awhile. Just seeing this indicates that they’re still alive and kicking (and have something in the works).

Of course, filing a trademark is not exactly a huge investment, and certainly some companies have filed a trademark and gone under shortly afterwards – but for the most part seeing a new filing indicates of a sign of life.

A sign you’d be wise to pick up on.

21 Bizarre Presidential Brands and Trademarks

2008-09-19T18:59:04Z

Here at CI Sense, we like to keep an eye on how news stories impact the world of brands and trademarks. We recently used our Trademark Explorer to search for some new trademark filings associated with the American presidential candidates.

We hit quite a rich vein of bizarre filings. These are all legitimate applications to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Here are a few highlights, divided into actual products and odd slogans:

Weird Products

Mo’Bama- Apparently to be used for a ‘natural cosmetic skin care powder’. Is that anything like Mo’butter?
Barak? Oh Bummer! – To be used on bumper stickers and t-shirts. Clearly spelling is not their strong suit.
Bearack Obama – Allegedly to become a future teddy bear. We googled for some samples, but only found this eager ursine Democrat and this creepy blog.
Broccoli Obama – We wish we were kidding about this vegetable dish.
Obama Llama – Yep, that’d be a stuffed toy. And, of course, the unrelated theme song.
Obamanator – An ale from Denver’s Wynkoop Brewing Company. It’s already on the menu, apparently. Halfway through this campaign coverage you can hear about how they might have overdone the hop taste.
The Sock Obama – A plush toy. Use your imagination.
Palin Pink – Apparently going to be a lip gloss.
Palin Not Stalin – To go on shirts and hats. Maybe they filed this one before they knew how Governor Palin’s name was pronounced?
Hillary Magic - An air freshener spray, of all things.
69 Reasons Why I Miss Bill Clinton – A ’series of books’. One reason per book, maybe?
Anyone But Hillary, 2008 – As you can imagine, there were a lot of variations on this for the bumper sticker and t-shirt crowd.
The Clinton Countdown Watch – This one harkens back all the way to 1994, but we wanted to include it because of the amusing description: “watches with a cartoon of President Clinton on the face which count down the number of days he has remaining in office”.

Bad Slogans

No Drama With Obama – That one ties for ‘most awful’ with ‘Obama is the Balm…Let’s Heal America’.
McCain for Capitalism, Obama for Socialism – To be used in electric and LED signs.
O.B.A.M.A. – Depending on which filing you like, this stands for “One Bonafide Achiever Making Change”, “Officially Bridging America Motivating Americans”" or “Our Best Chance for Managing America”.
Obama Ain’t Your Momma – More bumper stickers here. It’s unclear which side you’d be supporting if you put this on your Subaru.
Obama Bin Biden – Presumably this will be embossed on the back of Republican kaftans.
What the Hill-ary Thinking, Don’t Drop a Ticking O-Bama on U.S. Soil – I wish we were kidding about that one.
White Haired Dudes for McCain – There are other dudes who support McCain?
McCainianc! – That’s a bit creepy, don’t you think?

You can see the reports we generated for all the candidates over on Scribd. To learn more about how we did this research, check out CI Sense.

Trademark Filings & Brand Launches

2008-09-08T18:15:05Z

At CI Sense, we often stress how trademark filings can give you insight into your competitor’s future plans and strategies. There is so much to be gleamed from what your competitor is filing.

For instance, here is an example of a timeline which shows how three trademark filings for a company predated any web mention or official launch.

In this case we also had the luxury of knowing ahead of time about a new slogan and Domain name (microsite) which made it clear what the company was going to push in their next marketing effort.

Had this been your competitor, having this information would have been far, far more beneficial than merely finding out about the new product launch. (Which would have meant, sadly: Game Over.)

Armed with the information above, you would be advised that something big was in the works, you’d have an idea of what that was and you’d be able to plan ahead, react, take action – and compete.

What’s new at Pepsico? – A Trademark Portfolio Widget

2008-08-27T19:03:19Z

Here is another widget from Ci Sense. It focuses on those companies which fall under Pepsico (i.e. Units), and their latest trademark filings since Jan 2008. Some of these include:

The trademarks for each owner are listed by Filing Date.

It’s always handy to have a “running” up-to-date portfolio of your competitor’s recent filings, for reference and quick trend spotting.

Snacks & Comfort Foods: Distilling Competitive Intelligence From Trademarks

2008-08-12T21:05:31Z

Monitoring your competitors’ trademark filings each week alerts you to new activity, but having a summary of their filings from the past six months to a year presents a big picture. It shows you the overall direction that your competitors or industry is headed. When individual trademarks are presented in context over time, the results can be luminous. Even if the product or brand has already been
launched, having recent trademark portfolios at your finger tips is an excellent Competitive Intelligence resource.

Below is an example of three companies in the Food industry along with their filings (sorted by date) from the past 6 months. Here is what we can learn from this:

Just a quick glance gives you a quick update of what they’ve been up to.
Often, closely related products will have the same or similar Filing Date.
Some of the non-food related trademarks have been highlight just to show some standouts apart from the main industry.
Although this is a snap-shot of the past six months, some of these products have yet to be announced.

Attention Trade Show Exhibitors: Do your Homework!

2008-08-06T20:52:29Z

You’re going to a trade show as an exhibitor. What should you do to prepare?

Well before the show, you should be able to access a list other exhibitors (or at the very least, the ones from last year).After a quick scan, compile a list of your competitors or other companies whose profile’s pique you curiosity.

Compile a list by owner of recent filings or add them to you watch list if you haven’t already. Looking at new trademark filings can give you insight into any new products you’re likely to see. They’ll probably be focusing on these new offerings at the show. For the most part, before companies spend money on ad material they’ve probably filed for one more more trademarks. Take the list with you to the show.

From experience, there’s a lot of down time (when potential buyers are off to various sessions, general meetings and so forth) use this time to walk around and see how (and if) some of those new trademarks, brands and so forth are being used.

Doing your homework can also help you decide what you may want to mention or focus on . With enough time you may even throw together a “me too!” component to what you’re selling!

Confusion is Helpful? Who Knew?

2008-08-04T13:36:33Z

While product packaging often makes use of distinct colors, color names themselves are an important element – and something to include in your trademark filing considerations. But to do so, you’ve got to come up with something better than “gold”, “green” or even “berry”.

But think hard – because you won’t be alone. And a company like Crayola isn’t the only one developing outlandish and original names for their colors. True, Crayola progressively moved away from generic-sounding colors such as “Green Blue” and “Yellow” into shades named “Cerulean” and “Unmellow Yellow” and have even gone with an “environmental” flavor for their recent: “giving tree”, but they are not the only ones seeking special color names.

How many outfits are of a “lemon” rather than “yellow” hue or a “sunset” rather than “orange” color? And the cosmetics industry truly seems to be taken with unique color names. You’d be hard-pressed to find a regular name like “red” or “pink” in a makeup bag (OK you’d be hard-pressed to find me near a makeup bag, but I think that’s best for everyone.)

“There are only so many colors for makeup, only so many reds and pinks — a red is a red is a red — but some of the names make them stand out,” says Nina Sisselman, vice president of creative development for High Maintenance, the company with the beauty license for Playboy. “If you’re in Sephora, with hundreds of choices in front of you, the name, the package and the color makes a difference.”

Color names are getting sexier and sexier – and weirder and weirder. While you can imagine what a color like “”Boudoir rouge” looks like, it may take more brainpower to figure out how red something like “Gash“ is, are whether you’d really want that on your eyes…

But odd and, dare I say, even repulsive color names, achieve a marketing coup. A Wharton study found that:

“when consumers spend more time thinking about a product, they form more connections to it and end up liking it better. Trusting souls that they are, shoppers believe marketers are trying to tell them something important with a name, an assumption she traces to the way people fill in the gaps in confusing conversations.”

I recall a Seinfeld episode where Elaine shows Jerry her nails which are painted “Toxic Waste Green” and remarks, “revulsion has now become a valid form of attraction”. I worry…

Ten Years of Apple Trademark Filings

2008-08-12T14:22:41Z

This reporting widget displays the prominence of sundry terms in Apple’s trademark application filings for the past ten years.

To create this widget, we parsed ten years worth of Apple’s trademark filings. We grabbed the descriptions for each trademark, removed the stop words and produced this tag cloud. The technical term in the trademark filing is actually ‘goods and services’, but essentially it’s a description of the trademark’s intent.

Drag the slider from left to right to see how the emphasis changes.

A few observations:

Charming 90s terms like ‘CD-rom’ and ‘multimedia’ disappear immediately.
‘Audio’ and ‘video’ starts tiny, and grow big over time.
‘Handheld’ comes out of nowhere in 2005. Likewise, ‘mobile’ is huge by 2007.

Of course, as Apple fans know, they can be rather cagey when filing their trademarks. In 2006, they alledgedly filed a trademark for iPhone in Trinidad and Tobago using a front company called Ocean Telecom Services. And, of course, they like to file trademarks on the opening of MacWorld. Very cheeky.

This is just one of the many kinds of reports we can create at CI Sense. You may want to check out our free Trademark Explorer, which enables you to complete comprehensive trademark searches to automated watch lists, detailed reports, historical filings and portfolio analysis

Photo by Terry Johnston.

3 Ways to Smell Your Competition a Mile Away

2008-07-30T19:52:31Z

How do you know that your competition is planning to launch a new product?

Always be on the lookout for the Big Three: Trademark, Domain Name & Slogan. The first indication would, of course, be that they have filed a new trademark. But if you find not only a new trademark, but also a new domain name (for instance, the mark itself) registered as well, there is a good chance something new (e.g. a new direction) is in the works often in the form of a microsite. And if you find another trademark – but this one is in the form of a slogan, it’s quite obvious a new marketing push is underway.

For instance, last June Procter & Gamble, among other marks, filed:

“Clinical Strength”
“Because You’re Hot”
“Secret, Because You’re Hot”

On the same day, the domain name becauseyourehot.com was also registered. All three were for “Goods” described as “Antiperspirants, body sprays etc…” That domain is now the website for Secret’s new “teen focussed” deodorant, Sparkle Body Spray, “an extension of the Secret Sparkle line of teen deodorant”.

It’s amazing what you can sniff out when you follow the scent.