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Top Five Ways Trademark Filings Can Boost Competitive Intelligence

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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.

Does Your Competitor Still Have a Pulse?

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.

Trademark Filings & Brand Launches

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

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:

• Naked Juice Co.
• Stokely-Van Camp inc - Gatorade
• The Quaker Oats Company
• South Beach Beverage Company

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

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.

Take Steps to Get to Know Which New Players Mean Business

It’s always interesting to track new trademark filings in your industry. To get an extra edge, try finding companies who’ve filed for the first time. By keeping an eye on recent trademark filings you can be the first to know about the new kid on the block.

Now, take this a step further. Gather all the trademark data you’ve collected over time (say six months) and see where those companies are at in terms of bringing their products to market. Have they done anything with their trademarks? What strategies have they used? Have they been successful? Voila, you’ve got a useful competitor tracking system.

Get All the Information You Need to Stay Ahead

Dave Wieneke has recently written a compelling post on Useful Arts offering tips on how marketers can “stay ahead of their competitors”.

One of his suggestions is to “watch for new competitor trademark applications”. He correctly states that the government site USPTO is a good starting point, but should not be your only source, since it “can spot exact hits, but not close calls” and does not compile information from other sources (e.g, incorporation listings, company directories and product announcements).

Dave suggests supplementing with a service which allows you to search for trademarks and be alerted of new filings:

“…so that when a named competitor registers a new mark, you’ll be notified in time to plan opposition or a marketplace response. You can register to receive notices each time a named competitor files a mark, or when marks are filed in a specified industry.”

“Early Warning” competitive intelligence is critical. But while like Thomson Reuters and similar services provide good information – they can be quite limited, especially in terms of how data is reported and they tend to be very expensive.

We try to avoid tooting our own horn, but in this case we think CI Sense provides a better – and more comprehensive - solution. Rather than merely alerting you to new trademark filings, CI Sense presents and analyzes data in a clear way and provides you with unique information, in report form – making your job much, much easier.

So you can watch your competition, find new competitors, identify emerging industry trends and even get brainstorming ideas.

All this means you don’t simply find out what your competition is doing – but have real tools to “stay ahead”.

CI - Just for Big Businesses? Think Again.

Think competitive intelligence is mostly relevant for bigger companies? Trademark searching for competitive intelligence may be even more vital if you’re a small or medium-sized business.

Often, in this blog, in order to provide recognizable examples, we refer to well know-brands and companies. Chances are, however, that you and your competitor are not P&G, Apple or Pepsi (there’s a reason it’s called Fortune 500 not 300,000).

Vernon Prior astutely remarks:

“If, for instance, a large multinational corporation fails to read the market correctly it can often buy its way out of the problem. A small business making a similar mistake will probably fail completely. In some ways, then, involvement in competitive intelligence is much more important for a small business than it is for a large one.”

Further, a smaller business has its own niche markets and needs to be to keep abreast of new developments. Sharing the same niche market with only a few competitors means an even greater need to look over your shoulder.

“Obviously, if you have an SME [small and medium enterprise] and wish to compete effectively, you should aim to offer something different. …you need to find out what is going on, decide what to do about it and take action before your competitors. That, very simply, is competitive intelligence (CI).”

Smaller businesses are faced with too many elements to keep track of, and up until very recently, developing an efficient competitive intelligence strategy was a daunting endeavor. Watching your competitor involved monitoring every possible source to figure out what your competition was doing, planning and so forth. This was not only time-consuming - but also beyond the scope of many smaller businesses. How many truly have the time or resources necessary to dig “into every corner and crevice available” in order to fully understand where they stand and what to do next ?

Missing something pivotal, as Vernon Prior mentioned, can be the kiss of death. You need to know about developments, as they happen. By the time the news of your competitors new product or direction hits the stands (or the net), your competitive advantage is generally lost.

Overall, of course, there is less information readily available for small companies – but this could work in your favour: having fewer competitors with smaller trademark portfolios means that a given filing by any of one of them speaks volumes about future plans.

Filings for marks in categories different from existing products may reveal that they are trying to offer a new feature to an existing product or have identified a growing demand - or even a new market to tap into.

Of course, trying to discern this by traditional trademark watching, only gives you a part of the picture. CI Sense presents information in context within your industry so that you can use it to watch trends and focus on brand competition. Our mission is to bridge the gap between trademarks and competitive intelligence.

We don’t just hand over raw trademark data. We ask the hard questions: what do you really want to know; is there a new competitor in your market; what are emerging trends in your industry? We combine automated indexing and categorization systems with human intelligence and expertise to provide the context that adds insight to trademark descriptions.

And you can compete as though you’re a big fish – even if you happen to be a size smaller.