The Trademark Branding Cap blog recently published two good posts on monitoring your competitors’ trademark filings to forecast new product launches and marketing campaigns. The first post provides an example search that you could run every month to monitor your main competitors. The second post goes a little deeper into trademark competitive analysis.

Let’s imagine you are a club manufacturer and you want check out your competitors’ trademark filings in December 2006. Simply go to the USPTO advanced trademark search page, insert the following in the dialogue box, and press the “submit query” button.

200612$[fd] and (callaway[on] or acushnet[on] or karsten[on] or macgregor[on] or dunlop[on] or nike[on] or huffy[on])

Presto, you can instantly see that Karsten Manufacturing, aka PING, applied for registration of the PING mark in 5 classes on an intent-to-use basis in the month of December. Does this tell you anything?

Please note that the list of manufacturers used in the example is an abbreviated list of club manufacturers that were randomly selected simply to illustrate the concept.