In this article, Robert Reading, Director, Government & Content Strategy, reveals a powerful new Clarivate analysis of the world’s most impactful and best protected brands. Companies on the Top 100 Best Protected Global Brands list have taken the greatest diligence, care and thought to safeguard their corporate and product identities.
Brands are the public face of a company, product or service. They allow consumers to identify the source and quality of the things they buy. From livestock branding over 4,000 years ago – the source of the term we use today – to the use of hallmarks for precious metals, the English Bakers Marking Law of 1266 and the modern system of trademark registration, brands have been an integral part of our lives for more than 4,000 years.
In addition to giving confidence to consumers, brands allow their owner to price their product or service in line with their perceived value – and a powerful brand can command premium pricing.
Measuring the power of a brand has always been challenging. Many methods conflate the importance of a brand with the stock market value of its owner. These models may focus only on company names or house brands, and miss the significance of individual product lines. Privately held brands tend to be overlooked because their financial information is difficult to obtain. The one thing that is missing from almost all the current methods for measuring the power of a brand is key information about the brand itself: how well it is protected.
A new measure of brand protection
Clarivate is in a unique position to use data – not subjectivity – to measure how well a brand is protected. By using our global collection of trademark, domain and litigation data we can factor in a large number of key measures to calculate an overall score for every registered brand in the world and their relative ranking.
Trademark data contains valuable information on:
- the heritage of a brand (when was it first registered?),
- its geographic footprint (is it registered in one country or globally?),
- the extent of its use (just one product or a wide range?),
- its relative importance within its field (one of many similar products or the dominant brand in that space?), and
- how distinctive the brand is relative to competing brands (is it a unique name?).
Domain data looks at the online presence of the brand. Finally, litigation data identifies brands that have been acknowledged as “famous” or “well known” and thereby carry an extra level of protection.
Clarivate has applied this new approach to our collection of more than 100 million trademark records, domain registrations and our unique litigation data sets to calculate the relative strength of every registered brand in the world.
Taken together, these factors all indicate the commitment that brand owners have invested in protecting their identity and how successful they have been in building a powerful brand.
The most impactful and best protected brands in the world
This new approach allows Clarivate to launch a new companion to sit alongside our industry leading Clarivate Top 100 Global Innovators™ analysis – the Top 100 Best Protected Global Brands.
The brands that make up the very first Top 100 Best Protected Global Brands list include some of the oldest in the world as well as some relatively young brands, from almost every continent, and across a wide variety of industries and sectors.
- 49 of the Top 100 Best Protected Global Brands are European. 35 are from the United States.
- 18 of the Top 100 Best Protected Global Brands operate in the consumer goods and food sector. 15 are in the luxury, fashion and sports industry.
- 19 of the Top 100 Best Protected Global Brands were first registered over 100 years ago and are still going strong.
- Seven companies hold more than one entry in the Top 100 Best Protected Global Brands.
- Liechtenstein is home to one of the best protected brands in the world.
As a result of the technology developed to produce the Top 100 Best Protected Global Brands report, for the very first-time brand owners will be able to see how they rank amongst their peers, by geography or industry sector – not using market capitalization or accounting measures but based on intellectual property data.
Furthermore, this technique is not restricted just to 100 key brands. Clarivate has developed a way to apply the strength scoring to all of our 100+ million active trademark records so that a unique Clarivate Trademark Strength Index can be applied to any brand, large, medium or small.
Congratulations to those brands appearing in the Top 100 Best Protected Global Brands report.
Download the new report to see the full list.
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