Brand Rewired

Connecting Branding, Creativity, and Intellectual Property Strategy

Anne H. Chasser, Jennifer C. Wolfe

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470648841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Intellectual Property Law
• Index: Law

Discover how the world's leading companies have added value to their company by rewiring the brand creation process

Brand Rewired showcases the world's leading companies in branding and how they have added value to their company by rewiring the brand creation process to intersect strategic thinking about intellectual property without stifling creativity.

• Features interviews with executives from leading worldwide companies including: Kodak, Yahoo, Kraft, J.Walter Thompson, Kimberly Clark, Scripps Networks Interactive, the Kroger Company, GE, Procter & Gamble, LPK, Northlich and more
• Highlights how to maximize return on investment in creating a powerful brand and intellectual property portfolio that can be leveraged economically for many years to come
• Reveals how to reduce costs in the brand creation and legal process
• Illustrates how a brand strategy intersecting with an equally powerful intellectual property strategy produces a greater economic return and more rewards for the brand project leaders

Innovative in its approach, Brand Rewired shows you how how leading companies are abandoning the old school research-and-development-driven innovation philosophy and evolving to a Brand Rewired approach of innovating at the consumer level, using multi-disciplinary teams to build a powerful brand and intellectual asset to maximize return on investment.

CHAPTER 1

The Billion-Dollar Question

At the beginning of the decade, Procter & Gamble had 10 billion-dollar brands in its portfolio, brands that generate more than one billion dollars in sales each year. Today, they have 23 of these billion-dollar brands.

—P&G 2009 Annual Report

Google was formed in 1995 as a start -up company by a group of Stanford students. Less than 10 years later, its brand is reported to be valued at $100 billion.

—Millward Brown Annual Brand Report 2009

How do Procter & Gamble, Google, and others like them build a billion-dollar brand? They design strong intellectual property strategy into their innovation and branding processes through the power of collaboration and interdisciplinary teams. In this book, we chronicle our discussions with the innovation, branding, and intellectual property leaders from top global brands to share their ideas and best practices in the next generation of branding and innovation. Whether a company is maintaining a brand that has endured for more than 100 years, such as Tide, or creating a new brand that will capture the attention of the world, such as Google, a rewired branding process can provide key competitive advantages.

We ask the question: “How does a company ensure that when it invests in developing new technology, products, and services, the brand it builds to sell that product will have long-term staying power and produce a greater return on investment?”

Based upon our research and discussions with brand leaders, the key to economic success in developing and maintaining brands is to design intellectual property strategy into the creative and innovation process. This must occur from the beginning through the use of collaborative, multidisciplinary teams to effectively rewire the branding process.

Whether you are a brand manager inside a large corporation, working in an agency, or an entrepreneur, you will find that important trends are increasing the need to think about intersecting intellectual property strategy with the creative process. Thinking about intellectual property at the outset of the creative process means that you will have something with longer and more sustainable value. Additionally, changing accounting and finance principles mean your brand may be revalued each year. The right strategy to protect your brand can increase its value. If your brands are diminishing in value, they may have a bigger impact on the company than ever before.

The goal for most innovation or brand campaigns is to increase:

• Margin

• Market share

• Revenue

• Market value

In The Game Changer (2008), A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, preached what marketers have long touted—that we must innovate and create for consumer needs and wants in order to achieve an increase in margin, market share, revenue, and market value. But in the changing demands of the current economic climate, that approach alone may not be enough. In the future, companies must add another layer of thinking to the creative process.

Long-lasting intellectual property must also be the result of creativity and innovation activities. This requires an interdisciplinary approach from the start with an understanding of what it takes to create powerful and economically valuable intellectual property.

If we approach the brand process in this way, we can get the job done faster, utilizing fewer resources, reducing costs, and increasing the likelihood of success. To do so, some assumptions that permeate most companies must be changed and new processes embraced.

For example, most people think of patents when they hear the term intellectual property, which taints their thinking about the need to intersect it with the creative process. But intellectual property, as it relates to branding, includes protecting all aspects of the campaign. Just a few of the components that can be protected as valuable intellectual assets of the company include the following:

• Product name

• Logo

• Slogan

• Design of the product

• Design of the packaging

• Distinctive colors of the product or packaging

• Copy in the ad

• Script of the commercial

• Look and feel of the retail location or point of sale

• Distinctive sounds and smells associated with the product/ campaign

• Music that accompanies the ad campaign

• Content created on the web site

• Every aspect in a branding campaign, if it is considered as an intellectual asset at the time of creation

These elements are protected by:

• Trademarks/trade dress

• Trade secrets—know-how

• Copyright

• Design patents

Thinking about intellectual property in the middle of the creative process or at the end of the process is too late. Protecting every facet of the campaign strategically means it can last longer, have a greater impact, and produce a higher return on investment for the company. It becomes an intellectual asset of the company to be used as leverage in obtaining financing and an important part of the market value, which affects stock prices.

Brand Rewired offers a unique approach to an otherwise age-old topic for branding, innovation, and marketing professionals.

• A brand strategy intersecting with an equally powerful intellectual property strategy produces a greater economic return and more rewards for brand project leaders.

• The elements of a strong intellectual property branding portfolio often mirror a strong branding campaign from a sales and marketing perspective.

• Failing to consider these important strategies can not only reduce the effectiveness of the value of the brand, but potentially expose the company to lawsuits and increased costs.

• The internal black box-silo mentality culture of organizations can impede the development and capitalization of innovation, branding, and intellectual property and ignore key opportunities.

• A multidisciplinary Brand Rewired approach will reduce costs and increase return on investment.

Our research includes discussions with executives; innovation, marketing, and branding professionals; trademark lawyers; intellectual property strategists; and professional intellectual asset valuation experts from leading worldwide companies including Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Intel, Harley-Davidson, Kimberly-Clark, Kodak, Yahoo!, Kraft Foods, Scripps Networks Interactive, and branding and advertising companies including J Walter Thompson (JWT), LPK, Northlich, and Interbrand.

The Evolution of the Silo—Rewired

To understand current thinking on innovation and branding, we started with historical research on the innovation trends that have occurred in contemporary companies since the early 1900s to understand how and why we have arrived where we are in 2010.

A short caveat about the term innovation, which has largely been used to address the creation of new ideas, technologies, or products from a scientific perspective: In 2007, Wayne Johnson, the vice president of university relations worldwide for Hewlett-Packard Company, defined it to mean the partnering of two or more companies with the government and universities to share products and ideas to develop a new, innovative item. We use it in a broader sense: innovation can come from anywhere and can mean any new way of thinking about your business or brand. We view this as Innovation 3.0. Innovation 3.0 expands beyond new technologies and open innovation in the research and development department into the creation of new product lines, new brands, and new market spaces through intellectual asset strategy. Innovation 3.0 creates value while invention creates things.

We found that a silo approach to doing business dominated the management philosophy of the leading branding companies for most of the twentieth century.

Figure 1.1 shows the silo approach and outlines what traditionally occurred for many years. Executive leadership set a general strategy for the company. The research and development (R&D) department was charged with creating new products or ideas for improvement in processes. Across industry divisions, scientists, engineers, developers, chemists, or others with specialized knowledge would develop new variations of products or services, often independent of marketing, research, or consumer input. At Procter & Gamble, it might be a new way to make a better diaper or soap dispenser. At Kraft Foods, it might be a new variation on a product package design or a better process for making cheese. At Apple, it might be a new application or design for its iconic line of products. You get the idea. Each company has its own set of new ideas that R&D can develop.

In this silo approach, R&D had an incentive, financially and otherwise, to create new products and services via patents filed. In fact, many companies offered lavish awards ceremonies and perks for those from R&D who generated the most (quantity, not quality) patents in a year. For many in R&D departments, a point of pride was the number of patents on which they were named an inventor.

Patent lawyers, too, have had an incentive to produce a certain number of patents per year. In this silo approach, R&D would produce many inventions and apply for the patents globally before the product moved into the monetization phase, where it could be rolled out to its target consumer. Although forward-thinking companies have moved away from this linear and quantitative approach, the pitfall becomes obvious when looking at the return on investment in today’s climate. As the cost to maintain patents globally skyrockets, the need to monetize that investment sooner becomes even more important. Yet, if the invention itself becomes obsolete shortly into its life cycle, becomes a source of lawsuits, or has limited to no commercial use, the return on that investment is dramatically diminished. This silo approach no longer produces the same economic return.

Figure 1.1 The Silo Approach

In this silo approach, the project crossed over the divide from R&D to marketing. As the marketing and branding team became involved, they worked their magic in crafting a message and a campaign to sell the product to the targeted consumer. At the end of the chain, trademark lawyers would get involved to register and protect the name, run clearance searches, and review advertising copy to ensure the company’s exposure to lawsuits was minimal. Historically, most of the creative heavy lifting had been done at that point, and the trademark and advertising lawyer had limited power to advise on the strength or power of the brand or campaign as intellectual property. Instead, the intellectual property lawyer was relegated to clearing the name, slogan, or ad as “available” and as not likely to pose any threat of a lawsuit from some other company.

In this linear fashion, all of the parties worked in silos, each offering their expertise at a specific time in the product’s life cycle, rarely working together in a collaborative manner. Territories, fiefdoms, and power struggles emerged in contemporary American companies throughout most of the twentieth century.

The Fiefdom Syndrome

According to Robert J. Herbold (2004), fiefdoms can form in many ways and for many reasons. They have long been a problem in corporations where they easily form when people have enduring faith in the isolationism of defending turf, maintaining the status quo, and looking out for themselves (individual or department interests) versus moving the organization forward at a larger level. When fiefdoms form at a group level inside a company where a small group of people centralize resistance around common tasks, responsibilities, or objectives, the damage can be irreparable.

This process worked for most of the twentieth century. It was modified and changed according to the current thinking of the day. During those years when the linear silo approach thrived, the largest companies dominated with a monopoly on access to capital and economies of scale to afford the best people in the world. Without many challengers and a wide-open marketplace, business was simpler and the linear process worked, tapping into each group’s strengths in turn.

In the 1980s, a flurry of merger and acquisition activity began to occur, resulting in companies buying each other to obtain brands and technologies in order to dominate the marketplace and form mini-monopolies in product categories. As cultures merged in the perfect storm of activity, the silos, fiefdoms, and linear approach to development was further reinforced within these mega-companies.

In the last 10 to 15 years, however, this silo approach has slowly evolved and changes have begun to emerge. As the world became flat, a phrase coined by Thomas Friedman in his book The World Is Flat, global competition increased, and the need for greater return on investment became more important than ever. When global markets can compete with dramatically reduced overhead and increased margins, the need for more focused development activities that actually produce results is paramount. U.S. companies quickly became aware that if they couldn’t cut costs or increase market share, they wouldn’t survive.

Consumers also became more powerful than ever during this time period. For decades, companies had di...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• CHAPTER 1 - The Billion-Dollar Question
• CHAPTER 2 - Value Is in the Eye of the Beholder
• CHAPTER 3 - Designing in IP
• CHAPTER 4 - The Influencers
• CHAPTER 5 - The Black Box
• CHAPTER 6 - I ntegrating a Brand Rewired Process
• CHAPTER 7 - The Brand Maestro
• CHAPTER 8 - The Thought Leaders
• EPILOGUE
• APPENDIX A - Discussion Questions
• APPENDIX B - About the People Interviewed in This Book
• APPENDIX C - Mutual Nondisclosure Agreement
• APPENDIX D - Sample Questionnaire for Planning Sessions
• APPENDIX E - Team Meeting Agenda
• APPENDIX F - Sample Intellectual Asset Strategy Document
• APPENDIX G - List of Trademarks
• References
• About the Authors
• Index