Trademark Management and Brand Development

It's time to digitalize the brand development process! Equinox Brand Proposal embeds brand project management into a fully customizable workflow, so you can collaborate with internal and external stakeholders and centralize correspondence, documents, and decisions from idea generation to brand filing and product launch. 

Brand development projects can be deceptively challenging and time-consuming for businesses, especially where multiple teams, stakeholders, deadlines, and tools are involved. 

Coming up with a new product or service name represents only a tiny part of the brand development process. From a trademark management perspective, that name also needs to be cleared, searched, approved and registered, generating a substantial volume of correspondence and documentation in the process. 

These records represent an administrative hurdle for many companies, with few busy teams having the resources to consolidate the necessary data, documents, and decisions to inform future projects or report on current or past activities. 

In the short term, this makes it easy to lose sight of ongoing brand projects—especially where stakeholders are located across business units and countries. In the long term, vital records and documents risk being lost, as people move on from their roles or external advisors change. 

Brand Development Is Integral to Trademark Management

Equinox Brand Proposal was developed to meet increasing client demand for a unified platform to manage brand creation projects. The customizable solution saves time and energy by automating many of the most time-consuming administrative tasks. By embedding the brand development process into a linear workflow, it recruits stakeholders into the project at the appropriate stage and ensures their decisions and discussions are stored. 

By centralizing and automating record-keeping, the platform also provides users with greater oversight into brand development in their organizations over time. This includes coordinating and recording the decisions or advice of internal and external stakeholders, as well as the documents and correspondence that those decisions generate. 

By connecting different teams more easily, the tool can also help you to stimulate creativity. Finally—and as importantly—it simplifies the trademark clearance search process, helping you make faster and more informed brand decisions. 

→ Equinox Brand Proposal is interconnected with our full range of trademark management solutions and services, including our Trademark Clearance & Watch Platform, Equinox IP Management Software, and expert Trademark, Design & Domain, and Strategy & Administrative services. Watch our recent webinar ‘Mastering Brand Projects: Simplifying the Process for Optimal Results and Success’ to find out more.

Embedding Brand Development Workflows Into Trademark Management

Brand project management is only one of the responsibilities of IP managers, but it can often take up a disproportionate amount of their time. This is even more likely to be the case if the IP department does not have the visibility it needs into the brand creation or brand management process in the first place. 

If IP managers are only involved when it’s time to register the necessary IP rights, they will miss the discussions that informed the pre-filing decisions. 

From trademark searches to prompts for legal assessment, Equinox Brand Proposal includes an embedded workflow that incorporates trademark considerations into the brand development process to ensure IP managers have the oversight into each project they need. 

This workflow is fully customizable, so some steps are optional or can be adjusted depending on your needs. The default workflow takes users from submission of brand proposals through preliminary research and clearance searches to legal validation, marketing decision, and filing (or abandon) and post-filing activities, including adding the new IP asset directly into your trademark management system. In the process, it logs the history of all activities and makes that information available to everyone involved, so they can see what happened when and who did what at every stage. 

Inbuilt automation boosts efficiency and simplifies project management. Users can also independently configure projects to define  scope, markets (including jurisdictions and NICE/Design Classification), decision-making responsibilities, collaborators, and deadlines for every project. You can assign tasks and split projects by team or business unit, including prompting their input by sending contributor newsletters. 

From a business intelligence perspective, the platform also tracks key performance indicators, such as the value of submissions (percentage filed vs. abandoned), efficiency (speed of feedback), and so on.

Overcoming Common Brand Project Management Challenges

While every organization is different, most companies face similar hurdles when launching new brands. Typically, these include difficulties meeting deadlines, collaborating with internal and external stakeholders, managing documents, prioritizing trademark searches, assessing the value of shortlisted brand names, and accessing information from past projects. 

Equinox Brand Proposal helps to simplify all these challenges. It centralizes branding requests for new projects, gathers inputs and decisions through task management workflows, and provides access to past projects and previous branding decisions and suggestions. 

By prioritizing collaboration, the platform also ensures that teams work closely to make the necessary decisions, from product owners to marketing teams, regulatory professionals, naming agencies, and IP advisors inside and outside the business, including external trademark search providers. That’s not all: there is also a dedicated version of this solution for patents and inventions, so your patent, trademark, and design workflows can be combined into a single platform. 

For more on Equinox Brand Proposal, watch our webinar ‘Mastering Brand Projects: Simplifying the Process for Optimal Results and Success.’ 

Equinox Brand Proposal embeds the brand development process into trademark management, and is fully customizable. Our team of experts will work with you to personalize the workflows to meet your exact needs. Contact us today to request a demo.