Should you trademark your brand before you start public relations?

If you are building a brand, and it's not protected, you are leaving your company exposed on 2 fronts; you are ignoring a source of potential revenue but you are also in danger of building the brand for someone else to take it from you.

On this show I share about the trade mark protection process which I am undertaking for the SPEAK|pr program of masterminds, including this podcast which now is in the top 20% of all podcast shows (according to Libsyn rankings). I share considerations for any business owner to register their trade marks and the costs of doing so; along with some cautionary notes on not doing so e.g. Apple had to pay $60 million for the iPad trademark in China because another entity had registered it first.

Key point to remember: Intellectual property works on “first to file” basis (whoever protects it first gets the rights).  mention these firms which can help with global IP protection: AbelImray and Rouse.

About the show:
SPEAK|Pr is for business owners to unlock the value in their business brought to you by entrepreneur Jim James.
Twitter @jimajames

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Transcript

Jim James: 0:12

Imagine if you could monetize your brand. You're putting all that time and effort into building it, delivering it, and making happy customers, but what about making money from the brand itself? Well, you can, and it's called IP protection. Today, I'm going to share with you the journey that I'm on to protect the brand of SPEAK|pr. Intellectual property rights are commodities of knowledge-based goods that can be bought and sold, and the license can be withheld or utilized. Whatever we've got, the logo, the product names, and so on all create intellectual property. They've got value, so let's talk about how we can protect them and monetize them with IP rights. I'm working on this, because the SPEAK|pr program which includes the podcast and Mastermind that I've deveoped to accompany it are starting to get some traction in the marketplace. I know that, because I've just reached the 4,000th download for my podcast, and according to Libsyn, one of the big podcasting hosts, that puts me in the top 20% of podcast shows worldwide. I've also worked on building a five-stage methodology called SPEAK|pr, and I have started the conversation now with a training company in the UK to license this five-stage process that I've built. It's a series of videos and Masterminds taking place over eight weeks, and it has some tangible brand value and assets that I've developed as a result of the 25 years of helping clients build brands and building brands myself using public relations. I'm working now under the EastWest PR company to create some assets which are IP-based. That's going to be by way of an intellectual property trademark registration. Obviously, it's not just small companies like mine that are doing this. It's the big companies that know how to do this very well. According to Forbes, the brand value of Apple is nearly 150 billion, and it has increased significantly in the last 10 years. Rovio, the Scandinavian creator of Angry Birds, makes over 20% of the company's revenue with licensing, and many smaller companies do the same. Of course, President Trump has used the Trump name as a brand to license. So, in the world of IP protection, there's a lot of money trading hands, but it's also an asset that investors are interested in buying from a company, because it's a way of monetizing a service, a brand, or a process that a company has developed to do its own business that other people might want to use as well. However, the thing to note is if it's not properly protected, it can be very expensive. If we look at Apple again, they had to pay $60 million for the IP trademark in China, because another entity had registered the trademark iPad before them. Intellectual property works on a first-to-file basis, so whoever protects it first gets the rights. There are some 20,000 trademarks registered everyday, amazingly enough. I was having a conversation recently with a young entrepreneur in New Zealand who wants to introduce a product into China, and I was telling o him that before he does any marketing whatsoever in China, he needs to get his brand registered. So, how do we go about doing that? Well, there's a company called Rouse, which is very big in China when it comes to intellectual property registration. I've also spoken to a company called Able & Imray. There is a process and there is a cost to all this, so let me take you through it. First, you can register a brand as a logo and also as a name, and the description of the product or service that you're registering apparently can't be so generic as to be a common term in the general lexicon of language, so you have to find something that is descriptive enough that has relevance and currency in the market, but also something that is specific enough for you to own. I'm not sure how Apple managed to register the word "Apple," but presumably, it was because they registered Apple as a computer, not as a fruit. That leads me on to the next point, which is that there are different classes of IP registration. When we were working through Morgan and looking to register Morgan in China, that was in category 38 under engineering. Actually, Morgan the brand name was already registered to a company called Morgan Advanced Materials, which also makes gears for engines. For SPEAK|pr, I'm looking at class 9, which is instructional and teaching electronic publications and downloadable podcasts, because the SPEAK|pr, now that I'm in the top 15-20% of podcasts, is worth protecting. I'm also going to register in class 16, because that is protecting handouts, so I can then have any printed publication, including a book, under class 16, and also under class 41, which is training services or courses for measuring and monitoring educational training programs in the field of communications and marketing campaigns. I have to give a description along with my application which is for SPEAK|pr, and there is a graphic device as well. Now, I can register the word SPEAK|p along with its design and logo, but I've been advised not to register the design just yet, because that may change and also because the most important part is to get the names registered first. In the UK, there's an official 170 registration fee with 100 per additional class, and Abel & Imray cost about 450-550 for the service, plus another 450 to handle what may be some objections, because the filing company will check for me that this SPEAK|pr hasn't already been filed as one of the 20,000 a day. Once it's filed, there's a period of 4-6 months where people can contest my filing. If someone else has a claim, they can contest that it's already in use. But because this registration is given to those that file first, not necessarily first in use, they would have to prove that they've already filed it and that they're using it actively for me not to be able to get SPEAK|pr as a program. This IP protection is important in the commercial sense, but also from a public relations perspective, because if we start to send out press releases about, for example, SPEAK|pr or your own brand, and especially if you send it out in countries and markets like China, other parties could reuse those. As in the case of Lamborghini or Tesla in China, other people had taken the brand name, registered it, and created a small business around that in a related category, and then sat on the domain name online and the filing. So, public relations really shouldn't take place unless the brand is registered for IP protection, because you could just be giving someone else a great idea of what brand name to register, and then they could squat on the business idea and the market that you want to sell into. IP protection, strangely enough in international public relations, is often not considered fully. People believe that if they're filed with WIPRO, which is the World Intellectual Property Organization, that they have a global registration, but it's not the case. We still also need to file in other markets. However, if you filed your IP in the UK with WIPRO, that gives you the rights to file first in those other markets like China and to claim with due cause that you were the first to register it and also the first people to use it commercially. But again, it's not enough to just register a trademark. One then has to trade commercially under that trademark for a period of time to make it then a brand that can be defended. I mentioned trademarks, because I'm actively doing this for my own business, but also because if you're working for a company that doesn't have trademarks, not only for the company brand, but quite possibly for a methodology or for a product that has a brand name, then there's risk and a public relations risk that that brand could be taken and that all the work you've done, all the press releases, the website, the social media handles may not belong to you. As entrepreneurs, we spend a lot of time building brands, but we may not think about what happens when it becomes successful, that it becomes something that someone else might want to steal or may want to invest in. From a commercial point of view, it's something that you could monetize, as I intend to do with SPEAK|pr by getting sponsors for the podcast where possible, or affiliate program opportunities, and with the Masterminds to work with a training company, so that they can do the delivery and the distribution, while I focus on the content creation, which is really where my skill sets and my interests lie. Actually, the cost of intellectual property registration is not as great as I personally had thought, and it's possible to do this with some support. It only costs 170 if you want to register your domain and your intellectual property yourself on the British gov.uk website, but there are a number of sensitivities around the trademark registration, both by classification and wording. Nevertheless, I personally have decided that this is a worthwhile investment to make for the business. If it's worth putting all my time and effort into, then defending it and monetizing it seems like the best possible crisis management prevention program that I can imagine. To put it simply, if you're building and monetizing a brand, think about how you're protecting it, and that can be done with the proper intellectual property protection.