Should you trademark your brand before you start public relations?

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the podcast for business owners and leaders who know they've got value locked up in the business. And they're just trying to find ways to share that. Now, 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. And today I'm going to share with you the journey that I'm on to start to protect the brand of Speak PR. Intellectual property rights are commodities of knowledge-based goods that can be bought and sold. They can be withheld or utilized or licensed. So whatever we're doing, the logo, the product names, and so on, all create intellectual property. They've got a value. Let's talk about how we can protect them and monetize them with IP rights. Now, I'm working on this because the Speak PR program is starting to get some traction. You're listening, for which thank you. I'm really grateful. But it seems as well as though the podcast and the mastermind that I've developed to accompany it are gaining some, some traction in the marketplace. How do I know that? Because When I look at the downloads for my podcast, I've just reached the 4,000th download. That's according to Libsyn, one of the big podcasting hosts. It's putting me in the top 20% podcast shows worldwide. Now, I've also worked on building a 5-stage methodology called Speak PR. And I have started the conversation now with a training company in the UK to license this 5-stage process that I've built. It's a series of videos and masterminds taking place over 8 weeks, and it has some tangible brand value and has some tangible assets that I developed as a result of the 25 years of helping clients to build brands and building brands myself using public relations. So I'm working now under the East West PR company to create some assets which are IP-based, and that's going to be by the way of an intellectual property trademark registration. Now, obviously, it's not just small companies like mine. 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 has increased significantly in the last 10 years. Rovio, the creator, the Scandinavian creator of Angry Birds, makes over 20% of the company's revenue with licensing, and many smaller companies do the same. And 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 or a brand or a process that a company's developed to do its own business that other people might want to use as well. But if it's not properly protected, it can be very expensive. So if we look at Apple again, they had to pay $60 million for the IP trademark in China because another entity had registered the, uh, the brand, 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 every day, amazingly enough. And I was having a conversation today with a young entrepreneur in New Zealand who wants to introduce a product into China, and I was saying to him that really, before he does any marketing whatsoever in China, he needs to get his brand registered. So how do we go about doing that? Well, I've spoken to a company called Able and Imre here. There's another great company called Rouse, which is very big in China, for example, with intellectual property registration. And I've spoken to Abel and Imre, and there is a process, and there is a cost, of course. So perhaps if I just take you through the process first, we can register a brand as a logo and also as a name, and the The description of the product or service that we're registering apparently can't be so generic as to be a common term. So, uh, if you have something like, you know, getting the water or getting to school or public relations program, we can't register those because they're in the general common lexicon of language. So what we're trying to do is to find something that is descriptive enough to have sort of a relevance and currency in the market, but also something that is specific enough for us to own it. Now, quite how Apple managed to register the word Apple, I'm not sure, 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. And when we're working for Morgan and registering and looking to register Morgan in China, that was in Category 38 under engineering. And actually, Morgan, the brand name, was already registered to a company called Morgan Advanced Materials, who also make gears for engines. Now 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 20 to 15% of podcasts, it's worth protecting. I'm 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, educational services, training courses for measuring and monitoring the activity of communications and marketing campaigns. Educational training programs in the field of communications and marketing campaigns. So I have to give a description along with my application, which is for Speak and then down slash PR. So there is a graphic device as well. Now I can register the name, the word Speak PR, but I can also register the design, the logo. But I've been advised not to register the design just yet because that may change, and also that it's really most important to get the names registered first. Now, in the UK, the charge for filing— there's an official £170 registration fee with £100 per additional class. And Abel and Avery are costing about £450 to £550 for the service, plus another £450 to handle what may be some objections, because it does seem as though we can file and the filing company will check for me that this Speak PR hasn't already been filed as one of the 20,000 a day. But once it's filed, there's a period of 4 to 6 months where people can contest my filing. So if someone else has a claim, they can contest that it's already in use. But because, of course, 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 SpeakPR as a program. So 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, SpeakPR or your own brand, and especially if you send it out in countries and markets like China, Other parties could reuse those. Other parties could take, as in the case of Lamborghini in China, or even in Tesla's case in China, other people had taken the brand name and registered it, created a small business around that in a related category, and then sat on the, on the domain name, the domain name online, but also the filing. So public relations really shouldn't take place unless the brand is registered for IP protection, because first of all, you could just be giving someone else a great idea of what brand name to register, but it could be that 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, for example, that if they're filed with WIPO, which is the World Intellectual Property Office, that they have a global registration, but it's not the case. So we need to file also in other markets. We used, in the case of Wake Drinks, we used a Hong Kong agency to register in Hong Kong, for mainland China. What is the case though is that if you filed your IP in the UK with WIPO, 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 people to register it and also the first people to use it commercially. 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. So I mentioned trademarks because I'm looking now and 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 a risk and a public relations risk that that brand could be taken, but also all the work you've done and all the press releases, all the websites, all the social media handles may not belong to you. So we spend a lot of time, and as entrepreneurs, we spend a lot of time building brands. But we often don't think about what happens when it becomes successful, that it becomes something that someone else might want to steal. And it's something also that somebody who might, in a positive way, may want to invest in. And from a commercial point of view, it's something that you could monetize, as I intend to do with Speak PR, by starting to get sponsors for the podcast where possible. Or affiliate program opportunities, but also with the masterminds, to work with a training company so that they can do the delivery and the distribution, and I can focus on the content creation, which is really where my skill set and my interests lie. So 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 actually only costs £170 if you want to register your, uh, domain and your intellectual property yourself on the britishgov.uk website. But there are a number of sensitivities around the trademark registration, both by classification but also the wording. And so I personally have decided that it's a worthwhile investment to make for the business, because 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. So with that, I'm going to not ramble on too much about anything else tonight other than If you're building a brand, think about how you're protecting it, because we often think about building a brand and monetizing it, but we think about we're doing that for ourselves, but it may not be the case. But it can be the case if you put in place the proper intellectual property protection. So with that, I wish you the best of health, a profitable and well-protected business, and That you carry on getting noticed for the brand that you protect and that you own in perpetuity.