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When Trademark and Patent Litigation Damages a Brand

Trademark and patent protections are vital to brands, but is there a time when too many lawsuits (or threats of lawsuits) over trademark and patent infringements can start to negatively tarnish consumers’ perceptions of a brand and damage the brand? If you look at the history of Apple’s patent suits, the answer is yes.

Matt Assay of The Register shared the graphic below from Verizon (published by Forbes) that depicts the “insane” number of smartphone competitor patent lawsuits. However, from the average consumer’s perspective, most of these lawsuits go unnoticed and don’t affect their perceptions of the brands behind them.

Click the image to view it at full size.

smartphone patent lawsuits

For the average consumer, brands like Apple, Google, and Microsoft dominate the buzz about mobile tech lawsuits with short-term buzz about associated brands like HTC and Samsung popping up occasionally. Consumers hear about the big brands hiring employees to focus on trademark and patent litigation, and a natural progression of human emotion ultimately follows – when people start to root for the underdog. That’s where smaller tech brands can position themselves to carve chunks out of mobile tech market share.

When does trademark and patent litigation shift from protecting a company’s assets and brand equity to bullying and arrogance? Fortunately, social media buzz can help brand’s identify reputation shifts, but operating from a position of brand dominance and leadership often leads to brand arrogance, a topic I’ve written about before for Corporate Eye.

We’ve seen brand arrogance hurt brands in the past with Microsoft offering one of the best examples, but Apple has been heading down the same path of brand arrogance in recent years. Will consumers’ perceptions of the Apple brand (or other brands heading down a similar path) be so tarnished by perceived arrogance that they’ll turn to another brand? Will Apple (and other brands heading down the same path) recognize the problem and fix it before it’s too late?

Only time will tell, but demise by brand arrogance isn’t a new phenomenon. What do you think? Which brand do you think is too far down the path of brand arrogance to save itself? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Gap Year Interns: The New Graduates?

gap-year-internThe gap year is a relatively new phenomenon and, despite a few strange years during the transition to the new tuition fee regimes, it’s certainly still the minority of students who take the opportunity to have a year off before going to university. For many students, the idea of a gap year consists of eight months bar-tending in the local pub and two bar-crawling in Australia. However, the reality is very much different and there are plenty of willing and extremely able school-leavers looking not just to make some cash, but to pick up some serious experience in a top company before they go to university.

However, the market for gap-year internships is incredibly competitive, not just because of the high demand for the top positions, but because of the low supply of serious placements available. Yet, a gap-year intern could make a massive difference not just to your long-term recruitment prospects but also could really contribute to your short-term business presence. Tempted? You should be…

Bright, Fresh and Flexible
Most gap-year students have no expectations, no experience and a lot of ambition. If you want to shape a particular role for someone in the short-term, it’s a perfect opportunity to take someone in, train them in the right skills and then there’s a fixed leaving date. Gap year interns see things from a new perspective that graduates just don’t and this can be a massive help on a short contract deal.

Happy to Chip In
Gap year students will expect to do their fair share of photocopying, tea making and number crunching and, provide you combine this workload with a healthy dose of productive and genuinely important work, you can really take the admin load off your existing staff. Those with a Masters degree in Business Finance may be less inclined to run off to the printers for an afternoon.

Ready Made IT Experts
It’s not too much of a generalisation to say that anyone born after around 1995 is going to be pretty savvy when it comes to Facebook, Twitter and social media, and almost all interns will be very comfortable. Their demographic and experience may well offer you some great ideas and a fresh perspective on your social media.

A Marketing Tool in Itself
Taking on gap-year interns shows not only to other businesses but to graduates that you’re serious about your workforce planning. Most gap year students will end up as graduates and, if the experience is positive, they will tell all of their colleagues about the great firm they’re going to work for. Nothing is stronger than word of mouth recommendations like that.

Undoubtedly there are risks involved in taking on gap year students, many of which can be mitigated by a strict interview process and ensuring you have very high selection standards. It might take your intern some time to adjust to the 9-5, but invest time and effort and you could be surprisingly rewarded.

Is There Hope for Yahoo?

I’m still holding out hope for Yahoo! I want this brand to find its way and live a long life. However, this brand continues to struggle and recent rumors of leadership changes don’t necessarily mean that the right changes will be made to sustain the brand.

This is a brand that has lost direction and is grasping at a host of straws to find a way to remain relevant and stay afloat. I wrote about keeping the Yahoo! brand alive here on the Corporate Eye blog in November 2010, and little has changed in the 7 months that have passed since then.

Is Yahoo! a display advertising company? A search engine? A media company? The company claims to be about personalized content, but that’s not necessarily the message that consumers are getting. The content on Yahoo! could be found on just about any other site, and the addition of content from Yahoo!’s network of contributors sourced from its acquisition of content mill Associated Content aren’t helping the brand’s reputation. Crowdsourcing is a viable strategy for media sites, but that crowdsourced content must match the brand promise. What is Yahoo!’s brand promise?

The big question about Yahoo! is this: why should people visit the site each day? The answer isn’t obvious in people’s minds. Their perception of Yahoo! isn’t clear and there are other sites that are the go-to places for the same type of content that Yahoo! offers. This is a challenging time for media companies, and if Yahoo! wants to be a content provider, they face the same battles that all media companies are facing. How to deliver content that audiences want in a way that makes them choose your site over other similar sites. It’s a tough nut to crack, and Yahoo! has its work cut out for itself.

The lesson to learn from Yahoo!’s struggle is this: don’t forget your brand promise and when the time comes to revamp your brand promise, be ready to commit to that brand promise even if it means making significant changes to the way you do business.

The online audience isn’t going to slow down, and Yahoo! is running out of time to catch up. What do you think the future holds for Yahoo? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: stock.xchng

Only 3 out of 10 Companies Have New Product Innovation Programs

innovation new product development ideaAccording to the 2014 Media Growth Study from Econsultancy, only three out of 10 companies actually develop new product ideas through formal innovation programs. However, nearly the same number of respondents to the Econsultancy survey also said that new product and service development is expected to be the most important driver of growth over the next two years. Furthermore, more than one out of two top executives also believe that their biggest-selling products three years from now have not been created yet. They haven’t even been invented yet.

In other words, innovation is critical to growth but companies are not effectively prioritizing innovation through strategic and tactical innovation programs.

The reason for this lack of innovation is unlikely to come as a surprise to brand marketers. As you might expect, the study respondents reported that four out of five new product ideas come from senior management. It’s hard for a company to be innovative when product ideas are being mandated by a small group of executives.

There is hope for improved innovation though. Nearly three out of four respondents to the Econsultancy study said that new product ideas come from customers, which is an important driver of innovation. The third most common source of new product ideas, according to this study, is the sales and marketing team. Nearly two out of three respondents indicated that new ideas come from the sales and marketing team.

Following are the stats from the Econsultancy study, which identify where survey respondents said new product ideas come from for their companies:

  • Senior management = 80%
  • Customer requests = 72%
  • Sales and marketing team = 62%
  • Competitors and market dynamics = 56%
  • Defined innovation program = 31%
  • Vendor and partner ideas = 30%
  • External consultant or agency = 14%
  • Other = 5%

With that said, the best innovation program should include the entire company and customers. It’s not enough to just set up an “Ideas” box in the lobby or ask employees to send in ideas at specific times throughout the year. Every department should be required to hold innovation meetings where ideas are allowed to form and grow. Google is well-known for its culture of innovation where employees are encouraged to come up with new product or product enhancement ideas constantly. Integrate innovation into every aspect of your company and make it a key component of your company culture, and new products will have a better chance of succeeding.

If the majority of your company’s new product ideas are coming from top executives, then your company has a problem.

Is your company innovative? Leave a comment and share your thoughts below.

 Image: Raja R.

Un-Stalling CSR with the Value Creation Framework | Part 2/2

(This is part two of this article, inspired in part by Forbes’ Why has Corporate Social Responsibility stalled? and looking at EABIS’ Value Creation Network (PDF). Part one can be read here).

Restarting CSR

The key to keeping the CSR agenda going lies in the SME businesses.  This is both acknowledged and discarded by the Forbes article:

Paul Klein: The vast majority of economic value is created by small and medium-sized businesses that don’t have the knowledge or resources to operationalize CSR. Is there an opportunity to engage small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in CSR and deliver social results on a scale that dwarfs what we’re seeing now?

Aron Cramer: I think that SMEs have a huge role to play …  Although SMEs don’t always have the resources to formalize sustainability, every business has employees, and thinking about how they are treated is crucially important. Every SME depends on having access to water and energy that is sustainable and clean so this is an issue of importance everywhere and also a big opportunity.

If CSR is ever going to have any impact, it has to engage SMEs: in reality, the big business version which is talked about is simply the hothouse development of what has to become business norms no matter what size the business. [Read more…] about Un-Stalling CSR with the Value Creation Framework | Part 2/2