Valuing Intangibles: Ranking Brands, Measuring Trade Mark Use

品牌是识别特定产品的名称、短语、符号或设计，它们几乎总是受到商标的保护。这使商标所有人有权通过法院打击对其品牌的复制和未经许可的使用。这种对品牌名称的保护使得商标保护对于任何与客户保持距离的企业来说都是必不可少的，因为在这种情况下，个人关系不再能保护卖家的声誉。商标注册处的数据提供了现有和潜在未来品牌的完整清单。并不是所有的商标都投入使用，所以注册簿上的商标列表比任何给定时间正在使用的品牌列表都要长。某一特定商标是否已被使用，以及它的知名度有多广，这些问题是许多商标法律纠纷的核心。目前回答这些问题的经验数据是通过调查收集的，这可能是相当昂贵的。该项目的目的是通过结合从商标注册处获得的数据和来自谷歌搜索产品(Google Search、Google Trends和Google Insights for Search)的数据来改进品牌价值的衡量和商标使用的衡量。使用这些衡量标准，我们将分析和比较英国和智利的品牌价值和商标使用情况。虽然英国一直是许多在全球取得成功的品牌的来源地，但智利的品牌更多地集中在国家或地区市场。尽管如此，品牌对智利的经济活动还是非常重要的。该项目将首次展示商标保护如何在如此快速发展的经济中塑造经济活动。商标注册数据的一个重要限制是缺乏与品牌价值或商标使用相关的变量。来自Google Search、Google Trends和Google Insights for Search的数据可以用来解决这些问题。通过统计一个品牌名称出现在谷歌搜索上的网站数量，或消费者使用谷歌趋势或洞察搜索该名称的次数，可以获得价值和使用相关性。我们把这些称为谷歌引文。这样的引用可以提供品牌重要性的排名，可以表明某个特定商标被使用以及该品牌被了解的范围有多广。在使用这些数据时，必须克服两个重要挑战：谷歌引用的异质性和试图操纵所获得的衡量标准。这两个挑战都将在该项目中得到解决。谷歌的引文是多种多样的，因为一个网站上的引文或在给定时间对商标的搜索可能反映出积极的兴趣，而另一个时间的引文或搜索可能反映出对某个品牌的负面兴趣。将两者综合起来将具有误导性。我们打算通过使用来自Google Trends的信息来解决这些问题，这些信息包含关于不同时间的特定搜索词的新闻。在情感分析的帮助下，这些新闻项目可以变成关于搜索质量的信息或网页。通过PageRank链接分析算法操纵谷歌网站排名的尝试比比皆是。目前，我们还不知道有人试图操纵谷歌其他服务上的数据，但有可能会发生。我们将考虑限制我们使用的搜索词的方法，以便从谷歌的搜索产品中获得一致的价值衡量标准。

Brands are names, phrases, symbols or designs that identify particular products and they are almost always protected by trade marks. These entitle trade mark owners to fight copying and unlicensed use of their brands through the courts. This protection of a brand name makes trade mark protection essential for any business dealing with customers at arms length, because personal relationships can no longer protect the reputation of the seller in this case. Data from the trade mark register provides a complete list of existing and potential future brands. Not all trade marks are put to use, so the list of trade marks on the register is longer than the list of brands that are in use at any given time. The questions, whether a particular trade mark has been put to use and how widely it is known, are at the heart of many legal disputes about trade marks. Currently empirical data to answer these questions are collected through surveys, which can be quite costly.The aim of this project is to improve the measurement of brand value and the measurement of trade mark use by combining data obtained from trade mark registers and data from Google's search products (Google Search, Google Trends and Google Insights for Search). Using these measures we will analyze and compare brand value and trade mark use in the United Kingdom and in Chile. While the United Kingdom has been and is the source of many brands with worldwide success, brands in Chile are more concentrated on the national or regional markets. Nonetheless brand names are of enormous importance to economic activity in Chile. The project will be the first to show how trade mark protection shapes economic activity in such a fast developing economy.An important limitation of trade mark register data is a dearth of variables, which are correlated with the value of brands or the use of trade marks. Data from Google Search, Google Trends and Google Insights for Search can be used to remedy these problems. By counting the number of websites a brand name appears on using Google Search, or the number of times that that name is searched for by consumers using Google Trends or Insights for Search, value and use correlates can be obtained. We refer to these as Google citations. Such citations can provide a ranking of the importance of brands, can show that a given trade marks is being used and how widely the brand is known.In using these data two important challenges must be overcome: heterogeneity of Google citations and attempts to manipulate the measures obtained. Both challenges will be addressed in the project. Google citations are heterogeneous because a citation on one website or a search for the mark at a given time may reflect positive interest while another citation or a search at another time may reflect negative interest in a brand. Aggregating the two would be misleading. We intend to resolve these problems by using information from Google Trends that contains news about a particular search term at different times. These news items can be turned into information about the quality of a search or web pages with the help of sentiment analysis. Attempts to manipulate Google's rankings of websites though the PageRank link analysis algorithm are legion. At present attempts to manipulate data on Google's other services are not known to us, but they could arise. We will consider ways of limiting the search terms we employ in order to obtain consistent measures of value from Google's search products.