In April, Dave Davis from redfly marketing reported on the impact of MySpace registering their trademark with Google. This trademark caused many home grown MySpace fan sites to take a hit because of the lack of Adsense opportunities.
Issues like this highlighted the risk surrounding niche bottom feeder sites. Brand feeders tend to latch onto popular online tends, many feeders leverage bigger brands and target unexplored brand niches. Large corporate brands face this problem on a daily basis.
Feeding your brand.
In the MySpace example, many of the Feeders where not trying to directly compete with MySpace. Smart brands are aware that keeping your brand space busy can sometime be a good thing. A busier brand market place means that the cost for competitors to leverage your brand will often be quite high. This brand cluttering concept will result in competitors costs being driven up.
The downside of brand cluttering is that when a brand becomes too cluttered it can be hard for your clients to see through all of the smoke. While your competitor’s costs will rise, so will the cost of maintaining your brand.
Allakhazam and the brand revolts!
Accountants and CFO’s are the kryptonite for any brand marketer. As soon as a good accountant sees that the maintenance of a brand is becoming too high, they will often look for a solution to the problem. The simplest option is always the first route that will be taken. Simple is not a word I would normally associate with the registering a trademark with Google. Anyone that has been faced with challenge of registering a trademark with Google will understand that the process is long and arduous.
You own the trademark but not the brand
Most companies are unaware that their customers control their brand. This was covered in a book entitled Brand Hijack by Alex Wipperfurth
. Alex suggests that the role of a brand marketer is to guide a brand not control it.
The interesting thing about a “simple” solution to a problem is that it will often backfire on the brand marketer. After Dave highlighted this issue, I decided I would keep an eye on void that the Myspace trademark saga left behind.
As brand feeders could no longer buy some of the pie, they were forced to invade the organic space. Using the Mark Alert tool from Domain Tools, I tracked the rate of new domain names being registered with the term “myspace” somewhere in the domain. In total over 2421 domains where identified with matching criteria. The Graph below tracks the rate of growth over a 40 day period. The graph peaks at 229 and dips to 14 at its higest and lowest point.
“Sometimes it is better to guide a brand rather than control it.” – Jason Roe
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