How much is your brand worth?

The fourth annual BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking was published by Millward Brown Optimor on 29 April 2009.

The “world’s largest brand equity study” seeks to put a monetary value on the most important brands in the global market by using economic and market data in combination with research on consumers and business-to-business users.

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There has been significant discussion in relation to the impact of the Internet on trade marks and brand protection, with every “next big thing” posing new challenges to brand owners.

The challenges began with issues such as unauthorised trade mark use in domain names (‘cyber squatting’), and then the use of marketing tools using third parties’ brands to attract customers through the use of ‘adwords’ and ‘metatags’.

The current hot topic is the Twitter network, which is increasingly becoming the new paradigm of social networking in the Internet.  Developed from the concept of a simpler and quicker way to be in touch with friends and the world at large, Twitter is quickly becoming an important marketing tool to businesses, as an obvious consequence of its increasing success.

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The World Intellectual Property Organisation advocates new dispute resolution procedures for alleged infringement of trade marks under the new Generic Top-Level Domain Names to be released in 2010.

As recent media has reported, the organisation who administers the Internet’s system of unique identifiers, ICANN, (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is proposing to expand the Internet’s addressing system to a large number of new Generic Top-level Domain Names (gTLDs), which are expected to become available for registration in 2010.  This means there will be much greater scope for the creation of domain names outside those with the more common domain names ending in identifiers such as .com, .gov, .org and .net.

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