Defending Brand Names: Top Ten Wholesale and Top 10 Wholesale, Abercrombie and Beyonce

Profits. Potential Customers. Web Traffic. Sales Revenue. Foot Traffic. Oh, and also Branding Value … an asset not as directly measurable as click-through customers, but an asset that still shows up on balance sheets when companies are bought and sold. (Quantified .as a neat projected spreadsheet number labeled Brand Value or Historic Market Asset Value.)

So, besides watching your CPA (Cost per Customer Acquisition) and CPC (Cost per Click-Through) direct online marketing results, you might want to keep one eye on your Brand Name Reputation.

Use Social Tools To Track Brand Health
By monitoring and searching social media sites — such as twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and online community sites that attract your customers, colleagues and even unhappy users -– you can detect and respond to any flames that may burn your company reputation.

Twitter Flaming

> Rapid response and full disclosure are the best defenses for rumors about your products, misunderstandings with unhappy and very vocal former customers, and to limit the damage caused by a product recall or government regulatory action against your company.

> Think the Consumer Product Safety Commission recalls of imported toys containing lead paint and other contaminants . . . often before major buyer holidays.

> Think also of Burlington Coat Factory who took a public hit and responsibility for one of its wholesale supplier’s who mislabeled “fake” designer men’s jackets.

Measure Brand Awareness
Online buying, selling and marketing was born from Direct Response Models -– Total Click-through Rates . . . Sales Revenue vs. Cost To Acquire a New Customer . . . Conversion Ratios (Click-throughs from pay-per-click advertising that convert to a sale, sign up, request for price quote, etc.)

Google Search

> Only A 5% Solution? Listen to Gian Fulgoni at an Internet Marketing Conference last year -– (And Fulgoni is worth listening to as he is Top Banana at comScore online trend trackers.) -– and you can see the online marketing results glass as either 95 percent empty or almost one-half full. ??

Fulgoni’s presentation floated the heresy that fewer than 5 percent of all search ads on Google produced a customer click-thru. But, according to Fulgoni, that ignores the branding value of even unclicked search ads that flash your company name and product category.

The CEO of comScore suggested we online marketing types are obsessed with “The Last Click.” This Direct Response Deficit Disorder (so saith Fulgoni) makes us ignore the branding value of all advertising . . . even if it doesn’t show up as a measurable click or immediate sale.

> By the way, there are metrics and analytics programs that will track and report on all the usual direct-response click-stream results, as well as fuzzier values like Brand Awareness. It’s a bit more involved than a bullet-point in this piece. So, if you’d like to know more about these Online Brand Tracking programs, leave us a comment at this blog post.

Defending the Name in Court
Protecting a company’s brand from copycats and sound-alikes may mean speed dialing the lawyers.

Top Ten Wholesale.com Awarded Top 10 Wholesale Domain Name

TopTenWholesale

JP Communications, Inc., publisher of a network of wholesale search, directory and advertising sites, including this Top Ten Wholesale Blog, recently won a National Arbitration Forum decision that re-assigned a copycat domain name from its registered owner to the established owner: You Are Here — Top Ten Wholesale.

JPC filed its brand defense complaint with an arbitration panel working under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. It made its case step-by-step:

1. Use of the site name Top Ten Wholesale.com -– before and after it was formally registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office — was proved before the other company registered a suspiciously similar domain name, Top 10 Wholesale;

2. Top Ten Wholesale made its case that the other company was using the Top 10 Wholesale site name in bad faith: It confused users seeking wholesale search, product sourcing and services with a copycat name. It directed viewers to a page of ads and web site links that were not related to wholesale topics . . . merely siphoning off commercial online searchers from JPC’s higher traffic site called Top Ten Wholesale;

3. The Domain Name Dispute Resolution arbitration panel also did not buy the superficial change in domain name -– Top Ten was changed to Top 10. The decision cited legal case precedents that found even changing the higher domain name (from dot-com to dot-net) was not enough to hold onto a domain name registration.

For more details on the UDRP decision re-assigning domain name rights on Top 10 Wholesale to the owner of Top Ten Wholesale, see the Press Center News Release — JP Communications Awarded “Top10 Wholesale” in Domain Name Dispute .

Abercrombie & Fitch Gets “Fierce” With Singer Beyonce

Abercrombie Store

As reported in Women’s Wear Daily in mid-September, clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch has filed a preemptive lawsuit against singer Beyonce to protect their branded fragrance Fierce.

Beyonce used the name of her alter ego, Sasha Fierce, to launch her new Beyonce fragrance. Abercrombie claims it has prior usage rights: It began selling Abercrombie fragrance Fierce back in 2002; and it formally trademarked the name in 2003.

Based on prior use in marketing (see Top Ten Wholesale and Top 10 Wholesale above), Abercrombie may have an easy time protecting its branded fragrance. Not in the singer’s favor — Rumor has it that Beyonce Knowles filed a letter of intent with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office back in September 2008 for a “Sasha Fierce” trademarked fragrance. Abercrombie claims it sent a cease-and-desist letter a year ago based on her filing to USPTO.

Though this brand protection legal action “smells” open and shut, singer Beyonce’s lawyers may claim either (a) Fierce is too generic a name to be trademarked exclusively by one company; or (b) the name change to include Beyonce’s public alter ego -– Sasha Fierce -– may be different enough to avoid trademark infringement.

Beyonce might have an easier time if she put her alter ego Sasha Fierce on a line of surfer parkas or light-up footwear. Being in the same product category, doesn’t help her defense.