HARD ROCK
“But frankly, one of our biggest assets in terms of tracking these counterfeit pins down and becoming aware of them are fans—the collectors. Tey send us emails all the time saying, ‘Hey, check out this eBay seller, look what one she has’, or ‘I know you only made 300 of this one and this guy’s selling 200, how can he really have that many?’, and so our fans are our biggest ally in helping us track these items down and they do a lot of the leg work for us!”
Brand ownership
Tis is an approach that pays dividends: using enthusiasm for a brand as a way of policing it fits neatly with the trend towards customer-driven brands. If the Internet is more and more an open- source environment, where users of technologies develop and improve them, so a sensible trademark strategy might be one in which a brand owner encourages its users to take ownership of potential threats against it. If a customer comes to a company to report a potential infringement, the company wins twice: because it discovers an infringement when it might not otherwise have done; and because its customer is even further entrenched in the values and the value of the brand.
Roby argues that this is not the only area in which Hard Rock takes an innovative approach to trademark protection.
“I think we’re more dynamic in the sense that we are not just a restaurant,” she says. “We are more than just a class 43 type of entity. We do have the entertainment and philanthropic sides of our business, we have our expansion into the hotel and casino areas, and we have our very desirable merchandise line, so I think compared to other restaurant brands, our areas of interest and what we monitor and what we care about are more diverse. Tat, combined with the fact that the brand itself, the Hard Rock name, has risen to a level in a lot of countries of being a famous or well-known mark means that we have been able to also scale back some of our trademark filings or at least the classes we cover, and rely more on our core classes now and the fame or well-known status of the brand.
“Since we’ve been around for almost 40 years, we can rely on our fame to some degree, but the flip side is that our name, in its meaning, is descriptive of a certain genre of music and so, in some countries, we still have to deal with that—we have had trouble trying to protect just the phrase ‘hard
rock’ in certain jurisdictions for certain services and so we’ll have to combine it with the logo or the generic terms ‘casino’, ‘cafe’, things like that.”
Perhaps the key point is one of company structure.
Roby says: “I am constantly in contact with all the other business divisions, be it marketing, merchandising, hotels, franchise operations and the actual units in the field, and I have direct access to them, and they to me. So we’re really strategising a lot more on our gross plans on the business angle. In the past, in some of my jobs, I felt I was much more pigeon-holed in terms of ‘you just do trademarks all the time’ and you don’t learn the business side so much. Here, I’m an integral part of the business angle as well. I think that helps me protect the Hard Rock brand better because I really get an understanding of where my business colleagues are looking to take the brand, which means I’m not necessarily having to play catch-up—I feel that I’m involved on the ground level, which is beneficial to all—the business teams, the legal team and the overall strength and growth of the Hard Rock brand for the future.”
www.worldipreview.com
World Intellectual Property Review May/June 2010
23
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