The Identification of Trademark Filing Strategies: Creating, Hedging, Modernizing, and Extending Brands

The purpose of paper is to explore companies’ trademark portfolios in detail. Companies’ trademark portfolios are not loose agglomerations of trademarks but, instead, contain complex structures that coherently protect a company’s brand. I develop and apply a technique that reveals the inherent structure of trademark portfolios. This allows an assessment of how brands are protected by trademarks and how trademark filing strategies produced these portfolios. Trademarks protect brands and make them visible. Brand management decisions can therefore be observed through trademarks. When new products are introduced, brand management deals with decisions to either create new brands or use existing ones. Such decisions require trademark filings which reflect both the creation of new brands as well as the development of existing brands through hedging, modernization, and extension.