Valuing Intangibles: Ranking Brands, Measuring Trade Mark Use

Brands are names, phrases, symbols or designs that identify particular products and they are almost always protected by trade marks. These entitle trade mark owners to fight copying and unlicensed use of their brands through the courts. This protection of a brand name makes trade mark protection essential for any business dealing with customers at arms length, because personal relationships can no longer protect the reputation of the seller in this case. Data from the trade mark register provides a complete list of existing and potential future brands. Not all trade marks are put to use, so the list of trade marks on the register is longer than the list of brands that are in use at any given time. The questions, whether a particular trade mark has been put to use and how widely it is known, are at the heart of many legal disputes about trade marks. Currently empirical data to answer these questions are collected through surveys, which can be quite costly.
The aim of this project is to improve the measurement of brand value and the measurement of trade mark use by combining data obtained from trade mark registers and data from Google's search products (Google Search, Google Trends and Google Insights for Search). Using these measures we will analyze and compare brand value and trade mark use in the United Kingdom and in Chile. While the United Kingdom has been and is the source of many brands with worldwide success, brands in Chile are more concentrated on the national or regional markets. Nonetheless brand names are of enormous importance to economic activity in Chile. The project will be the first to show how trade mark protection shapes economic activity in such a fast developing economy.
An important limitation of trade mark register data is a dearth of variables, which are correlated with the value of brands or the use of trade marks. Data from Google Search, Google Trends and Google Insights for Search can be used to remedy these problems. By counting the number of websites a brand name appears on using Google Search, or the number of times that that name is searched for by consumers using Google Trends or Insights for Search, value and use correlates can be obtained. We refer to these as Google citations. Such citations can provide a ranking of the importance of brands, can show that a given trade marks is being used and how widely the brand is known.
In using these data two important challenges must be overcome: heterogeneity of Google citations and attempts to manipulate the measures obtained. Both challenges will be addressed in the project.
Google citations are heterogeneous because a citation on one website or a search for the mark at a given time may reflect positive interest while another citation or a search at another time may reflect negative interest in a brand. Aggregating the two would be misleading. We intend to resolve these problems by using information from Google Trends that contains news about a particular search term at different times. These news items can be turned into information about the quality of a search or web pages with the help of sentiment analysis.

Attempts to manipulate Google's rankings of websites though the PageRank link analysis algorithm are legion. At present attempts to manipulate data on Google's other services are not known to us, but they could arise. We will consider ways of limiting the search terms we employ in order to obtain consistent measures of value from Google's search products.

The project we outline here may benefit businesses working with trade marks and brands as well as the courts, trade mark offices, trade mark lawyers and finally competition regulators. In developing this project we have been in contact with representatives of all of these groups to discuss our ideas as is outlined in the Pathways to Impact attachment. Here we briefly discuss how each group might benefit separately.

Currently the valuation of intangible assets such as brands and technological innovations as well as the intellectual property rights associated with those assets (trade marks and patents) is very complex and requires a great deal of expertise. This project will provide the first attempt to deliver reliable estimates of market value for trade mark stocks of a wide range of different firms in the United Kingdom and in Chile. These will make it easier for those buying and selling such assets, to derive values that are connected to the markets' evaluations of such assets.

Trade marks are frequently the object of litigation and it has recently been shown that such litigation is on the rise in the United States. The number of trade mark opposition cases heard at trade mark offices far outstrips the number of court cases. In many of these cases the use of one or more trade marks or the question whether a trade mark is well known are at the heart of the case. Currently, evidence that is brought to bear in such cases relies on surveys of consumers and evidence of use brought by the parties. This project will deliver a methodology to obtain data on use and extent of use by jurisdiction or territory from data collected and made available by Google. This data might then be used by the courts and trade mark offices to supplement the types of evidence already considered. The advantage of such data obtained from Google is that it would be comparatively cheaper than a survey of consumers.

Finally, our methodology will allow us to study the effects of mergers and merger related divestitures of brands on brand value. This question is of interest to competition regulators, which are seeking to reduce the anticompetitive effects of mergers by forcing firms to sell off parts of their businesses. It is currently difficult for competition regulators to establish whether brands that have been divested continue to thrive under new ownership in such a way as to fulfill their intended role.