Empirical Examination of Corporate Rebranding and Trademarks

Partner: Sonia Katyal, UC Berkeley, Law School, Academic

Overview

Project Description

Companies are frequently found registering new trademarks or modifying existing trademarks as part of their rebranding efforts. Several reasons such as the change of company management teams may explain why rebranding decisions are made. No empirical research has focused on understanding the rebranding activities of companies. This project aims at resolving this mystery using both the trademark registration data and the business data (from the Securities and Exchange Commission disclosures.)

The main purpose of the data collection is to focus on publicly traded companies and to collect longitudinal information about these companies on trademark rebranding activities; company profiles; other company level information that may be correlated with a company’s decision on rebranding. With the help of the data, we will conduct in-depth analysis and various visualization to help answer the following questions.

Research questions:

• What kind of companies, in what situations, are engaged in name rebranding? How does this change across time?
• Are name rebranding activities by public companies likely motivated by economic, legal, or other factors?

Data we have now: We have downloaded trademark applications data from the US Patent and Trademark Office website, 10-K reports from the Securities and Exchange Commission Website, and structured data from databases such as the Pitchbook. The data will cover around 4000 US public companies from 1946. The estimated data volume is around 2TB.

Assistance we need from the Discovery team:

1. Additional data collection:
   • Looking through the Trademark registration online database and code name rebranding activities of 4000 companies (maybe through web-scraping)
   • Download data from other existing database as need arises
   • Newspaper search and analysis to obtain negative publicity and litigation information.
2. Data analysis: a. Manage and clean trademark application data a. Conduct text analysis of 10-K reports to get information of the following variables
   • Firm size
   • Firm revenue (total income)
   • Firm total asset (previous year)
   • Firm total asset (last year)
   • Firm management and Board change
   • Merger and Acquisition
   • New Product development
3. Data visualization
   • Making graphs to present the changing nature of companies engaging in rebranding activities across time.
   • Other visualization need.

Expected Deliverable

• Build a dataset of all public companies that have engaged in rebranding activities.
• Construct variables that are going to be used in the analysis and graphing.
• Data analysis and graphing to show the characteristics of companies engaged in rebranding activities.

What would a successful semester look like to you?

• Build clean dataset that includes all public companies that engaged in name rebranding, with the following variables: company name, rebranding year, company industry type, company revenue, company total asset, company size, Merger and Acquisition, New product development.
• If possible, get the data on negative publicity and litigation for the companies during the years they engaged in rebranding activities.
• Make presentable graphs that can be used in publications on the topic.

Data

Models

Conclusion