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"Under the new situation, how should the enterprise trademark management department turn from passive to active?"
来源:IPRdaily中文网(iprdaily.cn)
Hello everyone, I am Meng Tan, the founder of Master Quan. Since its inception, Master Quan has raised a total of 200 million, and we have spent all this money on the product research and development of global trademark data and system platform, and the reason why we dare to invest so much in trademark data and system is because I have always firmly believed that for enterprises, trademarks are the most important assets of enterprises, and they may be more important intangible assets than tangible assets such as plants and equipment. Since platforms based on real estate or car data such as shells and melon seeds are of great value, it is logical that trademark data platforms can also be valuable in the future.
In the past year, I have visited many companies in order to promote Quanshi's Doppler trademark asset management system and Quanshi's trademark search professional version, Quansou.
During this year's company visits, many things happened that touched me. What makes me feel particularly confused and anxious is that the trademark industry is a very large and valuable industry, but there is a gap between the ideas of trademark practitioners and corporate CEOs, which makes me especially want to share with you my thoughts on corporate trademark management.
First of all, I would like to share with you a few observations:
Insight 1: The person in charge of the trademark looks glamorous on the outside, but the salary behind it is actually difficult to explain
For a leading company in an emerging industry with more than 10,000 trademark applications, the person in charge of their trademark work (a very key core role in the eyes of suppliers), we all thought that his salary was at least five or six hundred thousand yuan, but what we didn't expect was that his monthly income was only 10,000 yuan.
Insight 2: Blind simplicity and repetition made the trademark director resign and open a coffee shop
The trademark director of a leading Internet company actually decided to resign and open a coffee shop. Although in the eyes of outsiders, she has the endorsement of a large factory and the industry's top salary and benefits, but in her opinion, trademark is a repetitive and boring legal process. This job only needs to communicate, serve the needs of the product department or the marketing department, and the specific work is handed over to a reliable agency; later, in order to find something to do for herself, and in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency for the company, she even resigned from some agencies, whether it is basic business or litigation business, all on her own. At the beginning, there was a little freshness, and after a year, I felt that there was no challenge, and after thinking about it, the money was enough to spend, and my coffee dream had not yet been realized, so I simply resigned~
Insight 3: The trademark department of the top company is not recognized and is forced to give up the good platform
A super head content company, which has signed a lot of Internet celebrities, makes money by content and live broadcasting, and the company is equipped with the general manager of law and the trademark commissioner to be responsible for trademark work, and the number of new trademarks in a year exceeds 1,000.
When I first met the CEO of the company, I found that the CEO did not show recognition and familiarity with the trademark work, and my first reaction at that time was that the CEO did not have enough awareness of intellectual property rights and did not attach importance to trademark work.
Now that we've met, I'd like to express my thoughts and opinions, and I think that in addition to the regular content copyright assets, the company's biggest asset in the future may be trademark rights, including:
1) Referring to Li Ziqi's incident, if the personalities of influencers and Internet celebrities can be commercialized (the screen names of influencers and Internet celebrities are also required to be recognizable and registrable), solidified in the form of trademarks, and branded during the traffic period, there can be an additional income from trademark licensing or self-operated products in the future income;
2) At present, the trademarks of some Internet celebrity names are basically registered in the categories related to live broadcast services, but in fact, the most important category of Internet celebrity commercialization should be products, especially products that are consistent with the Internet celebrity personality, which is actually a wrong understanding of trademark registration;
3) At present, the traffic and user cognition are mostly in a single Internet celebrity, and we should learn from Xi Oriental Selection, establish the C-end user's awareness of the company's channels as soon as possible, and reduce the dependence on a single Internet celebrity, which requires the company to lay out the channel trademark brand as soon as possible.
When the CEO listened to my point of view, he agreed with it on the spot and asked for implementation. What is even more surprising is that the CEO also strongly expressed his dissatisfaction with the legal trademark work in front of me and the legal department.
He believes that what the company needs is a legal counsel who has the ability to make suggestions on trademark work at the company's business level, rather than just registering the trademark according to his requirements and giving him feedback on the basic results of the agency. Otherwise, legal staff may seem conscientious and hard-working, but their sense of value is very weak. After this incident, the general manager of law and the trademark commissioner were overwhelmed by the pressure and left the company, which is a pity to miss a good platform for rapid development.
Insight 4: The CEO is not so difficult to convince, but the corporate trademark staff can't convince their CEO
The CEO of a consumer goods company with annual revenue of more than 1 billion at its peak considers himself very trademark-conscious. As early as the beginning of the business, he spent a lot of money to buy the core class trademark of the existing brand, and both he and his in-house counsel believed that even if the trademark work was completed, there would be no problem with the company's trademark.
However, when they decided to launch a new product and wanted to name the new brand "Existing Brand +**", they found that a large number of similar trademarks had been registered and some of them had been confirmed for more than 5 years, and then the CEO realized that this was a problem that needed to be solved urgently. Initially, when making a budget to solve these things, the CEO gritted his teeth and felt that the budget was already very high, but the legal staff said that there was no way to solve the problem within the given budget, and the CEO said that it was difficult to accept.
That's when the CEO approached me. When the CEO and the in-house counsel went to pick me up at the airport, I chatted on the way and asked about the company's development, and then I asked, "What do you think is your company's most expensive asset?" The in-house counsel preemptively replied: "We have three factories in this city, another factory in **city, and a design center in **city, which are all important assets of our company......" But the CEO immediately stopped: "No, the most expensive asset is our brand, we are the representative of the quality of our category in the eyes of customers, as long as the brand is there, where the factory is, it doesn't matter whether it is our own or not...... "So, how much do you think your brand is worth with more than $1 billion in revenue?" I asked. "At least 3 billion in the capital market!" The CEO replied confidently. "With assets worth 3 billion, only 300,000 yuan a year to maintain the trademark is a difficult task, so do you think that if you spend 3 million on maintenance, compared to your 3 billion brand assets, is it expensive?" I continued to ask. The CEO smiled: "How can you say that you feel that this money is so well spent."
When we all talk to the boss about the value of the trademark from a professional point of view, the boss has no perception and will only blindly reduce your budget. But if we can shift the benchmark to a higher scale, the results may change. Now, the company no longer looks at the management of its trademarks from a professional perspective, but from the perspective of brand equity maintenance, and the purpose of core brand protection is becoming clearer and stronger.
The above observations have touched me that the CEO of a company understands the commercial value of trademarks, and for people like me, the CEO respects and recognizes my value very much. So why do many trademark management workers in enterprises still feel that they have no sense of value in the eyes of the company and their bosses?
This has to make me think: "Is this industry really worthless, or are we people in the intellectual property industry not making value?!"
Before answering this question, we have to face another question: what is the essence of the trademark industry, and whether the essence of the trademark industry is a professional service or a commercial service.
I believe that 90% of people in this industry will answer: the trademark industry is a professional services industry. But my point is this: the trademark industry is essentially a business services industry. The greatest value of an enterprise's trademark work is not to apply for a trademark, submit several review cases, or fight several lawsuits; its greatest value should be: to understand how the trademark supports the business model of the enterprise, and what trademark work to do at each stage to support the development of the enterprise; as for how to do it, this is only a process of allocating resources and identifying resources.
To illustrate this point, I often use another example to admonish myself, my friends and the clients we work with.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the workshop of the American company Ford suddenly became ineffective. To this end, Ford brought in Steinmentz, an electrical engineer and inventor. Steinmentz asked for a mat to spread next to the motor, listened intently for three days, then asked for a ladder, climbed up and down for a long time, and finally drew a line with chalk on one part of the motor, and wrote "The coil here has been wound 16 times more." They complied, and to their astonishment: the fault was eliminated!
When the Ford manager asked him how much he wanted to pay him, he said, "It's not much, it's only $10,000." At that time, Ford's most famous salary slogan was "$5 a month," which was a very high salary at the time, so that many experienced skilled workers and excellent engineers from all over the United States poured in for the $5 a month.
Seeing that everyone was confused, Stein Mentz turned around and opened a bill: $1 for drawing a line, and $9,999 for knowing where to draw a line. After seeing this, the manager of Ford not only paid according to the price, but also hired Steinmentz at a large price.
Seeing this, we need to ask ourselves: would you rather be the one who spends your time knowing where to draw what lines, or the one who draws the lines?
Unfortunately, in reality, what I see is that corporate trademark managers spend a lot of time to develop their ability to "draw lines" - they always like to Xi all kinds of trademark legal expertise. It's not that you shouldn't learn Xi this knowledge, but I don't think IPRs in the company should be obsessed with it. Trademark legal expertise is only a tool for corporate trademark managers, not even a decisive tool, and I believe that the tool that corporate trademark managers should master is the ability to think commercially.
Here's another example: the legal department of a leading company in the industry, they have always wanted to make a difference in trademark licensing. To this end, they learned from the world's benchmark enterprises in the Xi industry, licensed their brands to manufacturers of umbrellas, clothing, daily necessities, etc., and also sold licensed products on their own user websites, but found that the sales volume was small. They were very confused, the scene was exactly the same, why was the difference so big?
At the beginning of our conversation, I asked them if they had thought about the purpose of trademark licensing, whether it was the amount of license fees that was the most important consideration, whether it was to increase the sales of the main product and enhance the stickiness of existing customers, or whether it was to expand the brand's marketing power with the goal of potential customers.
In the end, we will find that on the surface, they are all trademark licensing actions, but when the business goals of enterprises are different, the licensing categories, pricing, and publicity channels are different. Once you detach yourself from thinking about your business goals, it's like you're not traveling aimlessly, and success can only depend on luck.
In this case, we can clearly see that if the legal department or the trademark administration department can only contribute to the drafting or registration of the trademark license authorization, the value chain is of course extremely low. However, if the legal department can give directional suggestions on trademark licensing based on the company's current corporate strategy, and provide an analysis of the company's sample cases based on trademark data intelligence, the value will be very different.
Many friends may say that there are still channels to be found for the mastery of professional content, because there are a large number of professional training content in the industry every day and every week, but can we learn business knowledge as trademark practitioners Xi?
To that end, just as in 2015 we first proposed to achieve trademark full process intelligence, in 2024, I want to do something that might seem crazy. I hope to help corporate trademark practitioners understand and master the business knowledge required for corporate trademark strategy, and how to quickly focus on the core content of corporate trademark work based on this business knowledge.
I firmly believe that as long as we understand the commercial value of trademarks, we can definitely make our own value visible to CEOs and companies.
For this reason, "if you want to do a good job, you must first sharpen your tools." I started as a patent attorney, then went to the company to do IPR, then went to study in Silicon Valley, and after returning to China, I entered the business and opened an agency, and in 2014, I firmly believed that AI and data will be able to transform the intellectual property industry, so I founded Master Quan. In the past 10 years, I have also had face-to-face communication with many entrepreneurs and CEOs, and I deeply feel and know what they want, especially in the past 3 years, I have been to many companies to communicate with practitioners in the IP department, and I have seen the difficulties encountered by many enterprise IP practitioners~
Therefore, I would like to share with you the "Core and Essence of Enterprise Trademark Management - 7 Lessons on Business Orientation" that I have thought and understood over the years.
(Original title: How to do corporate trademark work, the boss will treat you as a treasure?)
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