'A wrong brand name can destroy one's business'

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Saurabh Gupta | 26 Oct, 2010
Choosing a wrong brand name can destroy even the most competitive business, said Dr. Guriqbal Singh Jaiya, Director of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises Division, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Geneva, in an interview to SME Times.

Excerpts of the interview...

How can SMEs get the information on Intellectual Property (IP) or patent?
Dr. Guriqbal Singh Jaiya: A patent is a document published by a national or a regional patent office. Increasingly these documents once granted and in large number of companies even without grant are published at the end of 18 months from the date of filing of that filed date.

In the digital environment most of these patents are posted on the websites of the national IP offices.

What is required to get a product patented?
Dr. Guriqbal Singh Jaiya: Bulk of the patents granted worldwide are not patented in India. Even that information is free to use by you on the day on which it is available, without paying anything to anybody. However to work a patent, you need to be skilled in the field of technology. And the patent document does not reveal everything that you need to know to get the best results. That means that is associated with the know how of the trade secrets.

Do you agree that there is a need to create a forum which will look into the all related aspects of patent to help small business players?
Dr. Guriqbal Singh Jaiya: See...a bulk of raw patent data is available to SMEs for free. All they need to know is how to look for it on the internet. However value added patent information are with some 5 to 10 major international players, whose only job is to provide value added patent information services. They are all operating in India also.

We need to make sure that SMEs know what is already available for example from PIS Nagpur or NIC (National Informatics Center) and what is the valuable through commercial data bases for which you paid a significant fee. But they had also the non patent information of various kinds. So there is no need to create a consortium (forum). It will not add much more value.

In your words how important is branding?
Dr. Guriqbal Singh Jaiya: Smallest of the small needs a name. A name is much more than a mere name. What's in the name is not issue, credibility is linked to the name. A business needs a name. A product and its variants ether need a name or a way to differentiate. So if a small business produces a range of variants of the same product they need to be differentiated in the market, either through trademarks or design or copyright.

The trademark is the critical part of the brand as the vertebral system to the human body, which supports the whole business in standing up, to move in the right direction and give support to being competitive globally.

SMEs must understand that choosing a wrong brand name can destroy the most competitive business even though everything else is right with the business, particularly in international business.

Don't you think that branding or promotion is an expensive state for the Indian SMEs?
Dr. Guriqbal Singh Jaiya: Why do you think branding is an expensive state.

Promotion of a product includes marketing and advertising which need a big chunk of money...
Dr. Guriqbal Singh Jaiya: Yes, but branding starts with selecting a proper name. Why do you worry about secondary things. When you are born, you worry about marriage or you worry about naming a child. So why should you worry about the marketing and advertising. So when a business is born, it is born to do things differently. And it needs to distinguish itself from the competition and for that it needs an identify. The simplest identifier a business can have is its own name. So its name can become a trademark. Or it can have a different name for each of his product.

You need a simpler thing that is easy to remember that becomes more than a trademark. If something is functioning as a trademark, it costs you a few thousands rupee to register a trademark, and if you are doing a business of few lakhs it's worthwhile to spend few thousand rupees and registering your mark.

What would like to advise to a small entrepreneur?
Dr. Guriqbal Singh Jaiya: In the long run, productivity gain is the only thing which will result in real progress. But a business is not interested in progress, a business is interested in making money through safe value abstraction, then value addition. So a business is about return on investments. Businesses don't want to grow, their return wants to grow.

I am not worried about a micro business becoming a medium or a large business. But I am worried about it being competitive. And if SMEs are competitive, if they know how to play the game, then beyond intellectual property (IP) they have to learn negotiation skills. For licensing, selling SMEs have to negotiate and that is what is going to give them what they will get, not what they deserve.