Fashion and luxury brands know how to spend when it comes to marketing. From brand creation, advertising campaigns, creative direction, influencer partnerships, and runway shows, the budgets are often significant, and the rationale is sound in a world where brand identity is everything. Consumers not only buy into a brand's visual identity, but its story, the quality and craftsmanship of its products, and its ethical and environmental practices. Strong brands resonate with consumers, generate consumer loyalty and generate sales over many years.
Ask those same brands about their Intellectual Property (IP) strategy and the conversation openly shifts. IP is a matter for the lawyers. A box to tick. Something you care about when things go pear-shaped, right?
Think again. IP rights are not a high-brow legal concept reserved for those instances where someone copies your design or uses your brand name without permission. It is a bundle of well-defined legal rights (intangible business assets) that protect the creative and commercial output of your business, and New Zealand fashion brands need to be thinking about IP up front.
What does IP actually protect?
Another way to think about IP is that every dollar spent on marketing is a dollar spent creating and enhancing your intangible business assets. The brand name, logos and 'get up' (trade dress or aesthetics) you create and advertise are, or become, distinctive signifiers of your business and the products you sell, setting you apart in a crowded marketplace.
These brand elements are all trade marks that communicate, in no more than a few words or by way of a stylish logo, design, or even by colour, everything your brand stands for, whether that be quiet luxury or effortlessly cool design. New Zealand fashion brands are missing a trick by not investing in their IP and related commercial arrangements, such as confidentiality agreements and other supplier or manufacturer contracts, influencer collaborations and so on. In short, IP rights are valuable business assets inextricably linked to your business and its success and need to be protected.
Going global? Your New Zealand trade mark registration is not coming with you
What also surprises many brands is that IP rights are territorial. A trade mark registered in New Zealand does not protect you brand in Australia, China, the United States, or any other market where you manufacture, promote, or sell. Each jurisdiction requires its own strategy. Without registered rights in your key markets, competitors or opportunists may, for example, register or use your brand name, or a confusingly similar mark, in that territory, leaving you unable to trade under your own name or forced into costly legal proceedings to reclaim it. Thinking about IP on a market-by-market basis, aligned with your commercial growth strategy, is a practical necessity for any brand with export potential or global aspirations.
A better fit: Reframing IP as an investment
Reframe how you think about IP spend: not as a legal cost, but as an investment in key business assets that safeguards and helps you realise your brand's value. Marketing spend and IP spend are two sides of the same coin, and a relatively modest upfront investment in getting it right often pays dividends in the long term and for as long as your brand exists.
While we understand that budgets are not unlimited, there are strategies to reduce or spread legal spend. Also, consider the implications of not investing in your IP up front: failing to clear a trade mark for use or register it in a key jurisdiction, for example, could result in infringement disputes, unusable marketing materials, labels or packaging, losing access to a market entirely, loss of reputation and high legal costs, unravelling every stitch of upfront marketing spend.