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Top Five Ways Trademark Filings Can Boost Competitive Intelligence

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.

1. 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?
2. 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!
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.