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.
- 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?
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.
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.
