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The purpose of this paper is to educate financial services companies about the importance of trademark registration.

The paper reviews what a trademark is, what the advantages are to trademark registration, and the steps involved in registering a trademark.

The paper finds that trademark registration can assist financial services companies in protecting their corporate identity, which is one of their most valuable assets.

Financial services companies should give serious consideration to registering their trademarks and should register their trademarks where appropriate.

The paper will be of interest to a wide range of financial services companies who are concerned about protecting their corporate identity, particularly in light of the financial crisis.

This chapter provides an overview of five modes of intellectual property (IP) protection – patents, designs, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets – available in the United States, the European Union, and Japan. After describing the purposes of and principal differences among the five types of IP protection and outlining the advantages of each form, the chapter provides country- and region-specific information. The authors highlight the aspects of IP law in which international harmonization has, or has not yet, occurred, and offer insights into the relative advantages of various national and regional IP protection systems.

This chapter provides an overview of the five main modes of intellectual property (IP) protection – patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and designs – available in the United States, the European Union, and Japan. After describing the purposes of and principal differences among the five types of IP protection and outlining the advantages of each form, the chapter provides country- and region-specific information. The authors highlight the aspects of IP law in which international harmonization has, or has not yet, occurred, and offer insights into the relative advantages of various national and regional IP protection systems.

The purpose of this paper is to present the opportunities for and challenges of the trademark protection of country brands.

Insights into the challenges and possibilities of country brand trademark protection are identified using New Zealand as a case study. This evaluation is divided into four sections. In the first section, the relations and differences between brands and trademarks are discussed in the context of the country trademark. Then, possible sources of country trademarks are identified. Next, the benefits and challenges of creating and managing country trademarks are discussed based on the case of the New Zealand Fern Mark. The final section addresses the determiners of country trademark implementation and offers recommendations for country brand managers.

This study makes the case that a nation's heritage is a rich source of country trademarks. The selection of country trademarks must ensure that the chosen symbol conveys meaning and associations that serve a country's often broad range of offerings and resonate with a diversity of stakeholder audiences.

Governance structures need to be established to manage a country trademark to ensure the country brand's integrity. This includes a licensing system and protocols to prevent successive governments from altering the brand's essence which would destroy its equity built up over time.

This paper extends the concept of trademarks, once the domain of products and service brands, to the emerging field of place brand management.

While the current anti-globalisation wave is considered as a regional and cyclical relapse among Western countries, the new era of globalisation has shifted away from stagnant developed economies towards the rising prosperity of emerging Asia, where it is attracting substantial global inward foreign direct investment (FDI). Focussing on Vietnam, the country that is seen as Asia’s next economic tiger, the question of how important intellectual properties (IP) protection is in the international competition for FDI inflows is still unsettled, especially on the under-researched topic of trademarks.

This paper takes on the business history approach, which allows rich evidence from the dynamic and evolving natures of multinational enterprises (MNEs) to drive the research process, so that international business scholars can test models rigorously. The evidence provided in this paper is essentially qualitative and combines trademark registrations data, with trade and FDI statistics between 1986 and 2016, also draws on companies’ archives, industry reports and related newspaper articles.

This paper provides the chronology of intellectual property right (IPR) legal landscapes and the dynamic co-evolution of trademarks and FDI inflows in Vietnam. Three trademark protection strategies for MNEs and their patterns here are addressed. The paper also argues that trademarks bring new insights and IP protection strategy for pharmaceutical MNEs for the case of Vietnam is as important in trademarks as it is in patents. In emerging markets with strong incentives for FDI such as Vietnam, MNEs are not necessarily put off by weak IPR, but rather create alternative strategies for dealing with the lack of IP protection in these emerging market settings.

This study challenges the stream of thoughts that view trademarks as a “neglected intangible asset” among different IPRs, while in fact, trademarks advance MNEs’ knowledge by ensuring competitiveness and long-run survival in emerging markets. This paper is among the first few attempts to look at pharmaceutical industry through the lens of trademarks, moving away from the traditional patent-focussed approach. It extends the understanding of OLI paradigm and highlights that MNEs need to possess Oa and Op advantages not only at the beginning of internationalisation process but rather evolving through the time to cope with imitation risks in the host country.

Despite its Australian birthplace, the ugg boot industry is now fully dominated by one American company, and the Australian ugg boot industry has been frozen out of global trade. This study aims to consider the impact on the competitive advantage of culturally distinctive but not new, intellectual property (IP) through the historic lens of the Australia–USA battle over the UGG boot trademark.

This study uses trademark applications, court documents, annual reports and brand reports to trace the history of the change and growth of the ugg boot industry from a small cottage industry in Australia to a billion-dollar monopoly controlled by an American company.

Court documents and trademark applications from 1979 to 2019 indicate that Australian firms underestimated the cultural differences between the USA and Australia and thus failed to adequately protect the generic word “ugg” in foreign markets where it was considered to be distinctive, rather than generic.

The paper highlights the importance of the first-mover advantage that can be conferred upon a firm by IP that is not new. Trademarks must be distinctive, rather than new, but properly used, they can offer substantial global competitive advantages to firms.

The in-depth analysis of the development of the UGG brand highlights the importance of intangible barriers in global business. The impact on the competitive advantage these intangible barriers gave US firms over Australian firms in the worldwide sheepskin boot market is discussed.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of brands on small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) performance in the fashion industry, trying also to shed light on the different effect that corporate and product brands may produce.

The approach uses cross-sectional time series regression to investigate the relationship between trademarks and sales, controlling for firm size. A purposive sampling technique is adopted, focusing on a sample of Italian SMEs in the fashion industry.

Results indicate that trademarks do have a positive impact on SMEs' performance in the fashion industry, and in particular corporate trademarks seem to be effective in producing a sales increase, while product trademarks do not.

The main limit of this research is that no variable mediating the relationship between trademarks and performance was considered. Furthermore, the number of trademarks may not capture all the dimensions of brand.

The most important aspect is that SME managers in the fashion industry could benefit from a trademarking strategy; in particular, investments in building a strong corporate brand, thus concentrating SMEs' effort, instead of having many different product brands, seems to create greater effect in the minds of consumers, and thus result in sales increases.

This paper is one of first attempts to shed light on the issue regarding the association between SMEs' branding strategy and performance. Moreover, the distinction between corporate and product brands represents an innovative element in this type of study.

This paper aims to discuss the early brand protection efforts of Coca‐Cola.

The paper examines the hundreds of trademark infringement challenges brought by Coca‐Cola in courts and before the US Patent and Trademark Office and develops a tripartite system of categorizing these challenges by primary legal issue.

Coca‐Cola developed several innovations in brand identity protection including challenges to a wide variety of similar names, logos and packaging, the use of detectives in service settings and the use of consumer psychological evidence in legal proceedings. Ultimately, it protected it name against those rivals that closely imitated both words in its name or words similar to Coca or Coke. However, it was unable to obtain exclusive rights to the word cola which became the generic designation for such drinks.

Even today, the scope of Coca‐Cola's brand protection efforts provide a useful model for modern brands. This work also presents and summarizes important historical data.

This study examines Coca‐Cola's brand protection efforts and legal challenges in much greater detail than previous historical works on Coca‐Cola.

With many years’ economic transformation from “Made in China” to “Created in China,” the State Council has set May 10th as annual “China’s Brand Day” from 2017. This action indicates the implementation of brand strategy and the new national policy of promoting China’s brands. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of marketing background of top management team (TMT) on trademark and brand output.

Using the trademark application data of Chinese-listed companies, this paper constructs a multiple linear regression model and uses the OLS method. This research also uses two-stage regression to examine the effect of endogeneity on the results.

Our results show that the higher the proportion of executives with marketing background in TMT, the more the number of trademark applications. Furthermore, we document that the positive impact of TMT marketing background on the number of trademark applications is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises, companies with more patent output and companies whose CEO has marketing background, indicating that when TMT can play a bigger role, companies have better innovation ability and team collaboration is more efficient, the promoting role of TMT marketing background on the number of corporate trademark applications will be stronger.

This research focuses on the world’s largest emerging economy – China, which is different from the existing literature that is mainly based on western developed countries. With China’s economy stepping into a new normal and consumption upgrading, it is important and worthy of a deep discussion about which factors affect the company’s trademark and brand management.

Parallel importation, the selling of trademarked products through unauthorized distribution channels, can erode trademark image, strain channel relationships and disrupt global planning efforts. With the recent changes in federal court precedent and the landmark 1998 L’Anza Supreme Court decision, the legal rights associated with trademarked products in gray markets have forever changed. Therefore, the authors review the current status of regulatory and judicial decisions affecting gray marketing activities to provide a practical framework for marketing managers. Legal and nonlegal suggestions, for the protection of trademarks in gray market competition, are offered.