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.
Confusion is Helpful? Who Knew?
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
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
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.
What Not to Make
Most of the time it’s important to know what your competitors are doing, so you can stay ahead of the game, and possibly be inspired.
But sometimes it’s just as critical to see what they are coming up with – so you can make sure too keep as far away from the concept as possible.
Some of my favorite outrageous (and entirely unappetizing creations) include:
- Dooey-Gooey cookies. It’s probably not as bad as it sounds, but still…
- Slime Balls and Gel Tubes. Get ready to eat snacks from a tube!
- Pur Flavor. Having flavored water come out your tap is simply wrong.
- Batter Blaster. If you don’t have the 3 minutes it takes to mix pancake batter yourself, you’re right: you clearly have more important things to be concerned about than breakfast.
Have you heard of any strange products? What odd items are you happy you didn’t think of?
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.
What’s Happening Here?
There’s a trademark party going on and you’re invited.
Well, it’s more like a gathering than a party. CI Sense knows trademarks don’t have a reputation for being exciting, but we’d like to show you that they can indeed be riveting.
CI Sense is a new trademark search service. But, unlike other services, we won’t merely alert you to new trademark filings. We’re doing something smarter. We present and analyze data in a clear way so that you can keep an eye on your competitors, find new competitors, identify emerging industry trends, etc.
From a comprehensive trademark search to automated watch lists, detailed reports, historical filings and portfolio analysis, CI Sense is your crystal ball into new brands and products headed for the market. Trademarks can provide a picture of what’s happening in your industry and even make it easier to concoct new product idea. Competitive intelligence made clear.
These are some examples of stories we’ll be covering on our blog:
How to incorporate trademark intel from CI Sense into an overall competitive intelligence strategy, why categorization is important for CI, solid overviews of key trademark topics, fun posts about strange trademarks, informative pieces about the world of trademarks, as well as monthly posts spotlighting the top five creative trademark filings that month.
We won’t be covering legal issues around trademarks, like conflicting marks, opposition cases, etc. For a legal lens on trademarks, check out The Trademark Blog or Likelihood of Confusion.
Now back to the second part of our introduction – we don’t want to do all the talking – we know how dull that can be at any party. We’re sincere about your place in this conversation: while we will be providing our thoughts about the world of trademarks, we’d love to hear from you and what you think about these posts. Are you learning anything new about competitive intelligence? What frustrates and excites you?
We are looking forward to some great discussions!
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”.
