علامت گذاری تجارت خود: عوامل فرهنگی در طولانی شدن علائم تجاری

Trademarks protecting the brand name and associations are crucial in a brand's strategy, but little is known about the factors that determine a trademark's prolongation. To explain the prolongation of trademarks, the research estimated a multilevel hazard model accounting for trademark characteristics, firm's characteristics, and firm's country of origin national culture. The dataset comprises a census of 2911 trademarks in the US software security industry across an eight-year period, belonging to firms originating from 11 countries. The results indicate that a firm's culture of origin has a systematic effect on the types of trademark the firm is more likely to prolong and on the length of the prolongation. The age of the trademark, the number of categories where a particular trademark is present, and the age of the firm increase the likelihood of a trademark's prolongation. Larger and more innovative firms tend to terminate their trademarks earlier.

Firms invest a lot of resources in the visual design of their brands, such as logos, slogans, and the appearance of the brand name. The Wall Street Journal reports that the investment a firm must make to develop a brand's visual design typically ranges from $100,000 to $1 million, plus millions more on promotion ( Beatty, 1998). The investment in the visual design of brands helps to communicate the brand's identity, convey meaning, create positive emotions, and enhance brand recognition and recall ( Henderson, Cote, Leong, & Schmitt, 2003). Importantly, visual design helps to differentiate a brand from competitors ( Warlop & Alba, 2004). Copycat practices mimicking brands' visual designs represent serious challenges for many firms. For example, Sayman, Hoch, and Raju (2002) observe explicit imitation of the visual elements of national brands in more than 30% of 75 supermarket categories. To protect their visual designs from copycatting practices, firms register and enforce a range of trademarks. Trademark laws limit the ability of a brand to imitate a visual design of a competitor, ensuring that the uniqueness of a firm's visual assets is protected by law. A salient example is the Apple lawsuit's claims that the look and feel of Samsung's products infringe upon Apple's trademarks. Trademarks are important for global firms, because global firms face both local and global competitors' temptations to benefit from quality associations through copycatting (Planet Retail, 2007 and Steenkamp et al., 2003). A recent example is the launch of the drug Nulexin by a global generic firm, Generix Laboratories, which copies the original drug Hylexin produced by global brand Klein-Becker. The product names, ingredients, packaging, and even websites are strikingly similar; the key difference is that Nulexin is nearly half the price of Hylexin. Increasingly, global firms are under pressure to ensure that their trademark protection is active and that their competitors cannot erode the protection. The decision to terminate a particular trademark has serious consequences for the firm, particularly from a competitor's point of view. That is, a competitor may use an abandoned trademark and capitalize on the trademark's associations with the original firm. Added to this, recent market developments show also that consumers may resist a firm's effort to replace a trademark. For example, clothing retailer Gap abandoned its new logo in October 2010 after customers initiated a concerted online protest. Similarly, Britain's Royal Mail (renamed Consignia) had to return to its original name (The Economist, 2011). JC Penney's introduced a new logo in early 2011 and then redesigned the logo in 2012. Finally, Starbuck's new logo (launched in March 2011) was heavily debated in the news media. Yet, firms do terminate their trademarks despite competitive threats, and factors leading to such a decision are not well understood. Research emphasizes the importance of trademarks in protecting firms' brand equity against dilution (Krasnikov et al., 2009 and Morrin et al., 2006). Academic research on trademarks is represented by two streams. The first stream analyzes the consequences of investing in trademarks (Krasnikov et al., 2009, Mizik and Jacobson, 2008, Mizik and Jacobson, 2009 and Srinivasan et al., 2008). The second stream studies the effects of different types of trademark elements on consumer perceptions (Henderson and Cote, 1998, Henderson et al., 2004, Henderson et al., 2003, Klink, 2003 and van der Lans et al., 2009). With the exception of Morrin et al. (2006) who consider the contextual factors influencing trademark dilution, little is known about the factors that influence a firm's decision to prolong, or terminate, a particular trademark. The gap is surprising given that protecting visual design elements with trademarks is linked to a firm's performance (Krasnikov et al., 2009). Lack of protection leads to copycatting, which not only creates brand confusion but also stimulates brand switching when consumers interpret similarity as substitutability (Peterson, Smith, & Zerrillo, 1999). Given the large investment that firms put into designing and marketing their visual brand elements, understanding factors driving the prolongation of trademarks is vital. The goal of the paper is to understand the factors driving a firm's decision to prolong or terminate trademarks. The study addresses recent calls to evaluate branding performance based on objective measures such as trademarks (Keller and Lehmann, 2006 and Krasnikov et al., 2009), and to improve the understanding of how company and country culture drive accepted practices for branding strategies. As trademarks are a way to protect a firm's assets, a firm's culture drives the perceived need for this type of security, which in turn will be systematically influenced by national cultural values (Kanagaretnam et al., 2011 and Li et al., 2011). Therefore, understanding how the firm's country of origin's cultural values drive trademark prolongation decisions is crucial.

Trademarks are important assets of firms, allowing them to protect the design characteristics of their brand against global and local competition. The research addressed the antecedents of trademark prolongation based on a census of all (2911) trademarks in the SSI industry in the US, belonging to firms originating from eleven countries, across an eight-year period. With respect to a company's culture characteristics, larger and more innovative firms are more likely to prolong their trademarks. Further, the age of the trademark, the number of categories in which a particular trademark is present, and the age of the firm tend to increase the likelihood of trademark prolongation. Importantly, the results indicate that the firm's national culture has systematic direct and indirect effects on trademark prolongation. Firms from survival cultures tend to keep their trademarks longer than firms from more self-expression countries of origin. On the other hand, firms originating from either self-expression or traditional countries are more likely to prolong brand-association trademarks (with logos, color, slogans, motion, typeface, or sound) than brand-identification trademarks (name-only). The research makes several contributions to the literature. First, by testing a comprehensive framework for the factors that influence trademark prolongation, the research contributes to the literature on trademarks. Despite the growing interest in trademarks (Giarratana and Torres, 2007 and Krasnikov et al., 2009), little attention has been paid to the factors that drive a firm's decision to prolong or terminate an existing trademark, a void the research fills. Second, the research contributes to the discussion on the effects of a firm's national culture (Hope et al., 2011, Li et al., 2011 and Sarala and Vaara, 2010) by applying Inglehart values to show their effects on trademarks prolongation. Finally, the research addresses recent calls in the literature to evaluate branding performance in an international context based on objective measures such as trademarks (Keller and Lehmann, 2006 and Krasnikov et al., 2009). The research offers important managerial implications. First, the results provide insights for managers with respect to the behavior of their local and global competitors. For example, companies may want to check the position of a particular competitor relative to the firm's own and other competitor positions along Inglehart dimensions (the scores are freely available from http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org) to estimate their likelihood of prolonging a particular trademark. Generally speaking, companies from survival cultures (e.g., South Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe) are more likely to prolong their trademarks than Western countries. In addition, companies from countries high on the survival and secular-rational dimensions (e.g., Eastern European cluster) seem to be especially attached to their brand identification trademarks. In contrast, companies from traditional but self-expression cultures (e.g., US and Ireland) are more likely to discontinue their brand-identification trademarks and use their brand-association trademarks for longer. Second, as economic development tends to promote self-expression values (Inglehart & Baker, 2000), having a portfolio with unique brand-association trademarks becomes increasingly important. Yet, the low usage rates for some of the types of trademarks from the dataset suggest that many firms may not be aware of the additional categories of trademarks that have been introduced recently (e.g., motion, shape). Third, companies from countries that rely especially on brand identification trademarks and are more likely to keep them longer (e.g., emerging countries) should ensure that their brand/product names are immediately distinctive, protectable, and able to be registered as trademarks. Finally, the results suggest that despite entering the same host country, the cultural roots of the parent company had a strong impact on a firm's decision with respect to trademark prolongation. Especially because the investments into trademarks are very costly, an understanding that a different trademark strategy may be required in order to succeed in a host market is important. For example, firms from less self-expression cultures (e.g., Japan) may need to terminate a trademark quicker when entering a more self-expressive country (e.g., US), because consumers are more open to changing associations between the trademark and the brand than in the firm's country of origin.