Predicting Your Competitors’ Future Sooner through Trademarks
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Predicting Your Competitors’ Future Sooner through Trademarks
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Why Trademarks?
Trademarks are more than just branding and marketing. They are the canaries in your competitor’s coal mine. What do we mean by that? It means that trademarks are the first to predict the future. Whenever a competitor files a trademark application anywhere in the world, it immediately becomes publicly available information. And trademark applications are usually the first place that a company reveals its actual use of a new brand or its intent to do so shortly.
Companies file trademark applications to protect their rights to use their trademarks and to stop others from infringing on their marks. To establish their first user position and maximize their protection, they often file those applications at or around the time they first begin to use a mark or when they intend to use it in the near future. This makes trademark applications the first place that the world learns about a company’s plans and intentions for future products and services and where they are planning on taking their business. Often they can tell you a competitor’s strategy before you see it in the marketplace. Trademarks predict competitive moves sooner!
Applications include some very useful information: the mark for which protection is being sought and a detailed description of the products and services on which it is used. U.S. applications include the date the mark was first used on the products or services listed, if actual use has occurred; and any statements of intent to use the mark or priority reliance on earlier filed foreign applications or registrations.
Trademark Insights is the first service to compile all of this information from over 180 countries around the world and translate it into Roadmaps for the Future that can help you understand your competitor’s business strategy.
Real Time Information
Companies are always watching their competitor’s activities, trying to glean insights into their business strategies. However, the typical sources of information are largely historic and can only tell you where your competitors are or where they’ve been, not where they’re going. This can be too little, too late, for tracking strategy and making decisions. Trademark Insights is changing that by providing real-time information that can help you make the smartest decisions. We combine that data with current market information provided directly by your
competitors and the latest published industry sources and then build Insights and Roadmaps to the Future that let you see where your competition plans to go in the future … at the earliest possible time. Trademark applications are the best indicators that a product or service is already in use or that use will soon follow. Applications are filed to establish ownership of a brand name and to gain governmental protections against competitive use. Applications are typically filed at the time of first use or in advance of the expected launch of a new product or service. This means you get valuable insights into your competitor’s current and planned activity, not a history lesson in what they have done in the past.
And if a trademark application is dropped or a registration lapses, it’s a good indicator of a change in your competitor’s strategy. Unlike the other prevalent form of intellectual property, patents, there isn’t the 18-month or greater lag time between filing a trademark application and making the application public – with trademarks, it’s real-time!
Trademarks and Brand Names
A trademark (we’ll use trademark as a proxy for trademarks and service marks) is synonymous with a “brand” or “brand name”. It is the public identity of a company’s business offerings. A brand creates goodwill with customers and generates repeat business. It’s also a valuable shorthand allowing buyers to pinpoint products and services, link them to your company and simultaneously communicate quality and value. By promoting their brands, businesses create competitive advantages that lead to increased revenue and market share over competitors.
National governments around the world grant certain valuable rights to businesses that register trademarks. These rights enable businesses to establish ownership in their brands and distinguish their products and services from competitors. The beauty of monitoring trademarks is that when applications are filed, the information in those applications IMMEDIATELY becomes publicly available. And each time a company files a new application anywhere in the world, information about that application is made available.
By continually monitoring the universe for new, hot-off-the-press trademark information and combining that information with the most current primary source published data on new products and services, Trademark Insights can map your competitors’ futures and keep you current on their business decisions and movements when or before they happen. We make it easy for you to stay up to date without the hassle of a massive, expensive and ongoing in-house research effort.
Photo by Angelica Ribeiro