Well it’s September 1st and I'm returning to my Blog after taking a break this Summer with a story that has been on my mind for a few months. I work with a lot of clients and prospective clients who are new to the world of Brand Licensing and very often I see Brand owners going out to shop their Brands to prospective licensees or licensing agencies with no real story to tell. What happens all too frequently is the licensor just assumes that the prospective licensee or agent has heard of their Brand and knows its equity and just how strong that equity can be when extended into new categories. It is an assumption that is borne out of being paid to be your Brand’s greatest champion day in and day out in your company. Unfortunately, it leads great Brand Managers to start to sell their Licensing program with no real story to tell at all. The thinking is: “I recognize my Brand is great and has been real successful in the marketplace so others will as well.”
This thinking only torpedoes what could be great licensing programs before they ever have a chance to get started. Don’t fall prey to this syndrome. Start your licensing effort by working hard to pull together your Brand’s best selling story. Talk about its rich history. Present independent research that demonstrates your brand’s awareness, its equities, its strength and its extendibility. Pen your story as though you are selling to someone who has NEVER even heard of your Brand and sell them hard on why your Brand is right for their in-licensing program. Spend time talking about your Brand’s retail reach, depth and breadth. Provide examples of how and why your Brand is ripe to enter certain product categories. In essence, leave your initial meetings with prospective agents or licensees knowing that you told your Best Brand Story for that is the surest way for everyone to see the value of your brand as a licensable asset. Don’t assume others will see the value of your Brand; prove it to them with a well-researched and well-designed Brand Selling Story.
Often Brand Managers or Licensing Directors are too close to their Brands to be able to look at their Brand’s value objectively and then put together a competent Brand Story to prove it. If you are struggling with this, then I suggest you get help. There are many consultants in the brand licensing industry like my firm, Brandar Consulting, LLC, that can help you get your Brand Selling Story right and provide a strong start to your Brand Licensing Program launch or expansion. You often only get one crack at selling your Brand to a prospective agent or licensee. Don’t waste that opportunity; tell your Best Brand Story right out of the gates.
My Blog is intended to provide Licensors with unique insights about successfully managing a Corporate Brand Licensing Program. It is written from the perspective of someone who managed AT&T's Brand Licensing program for many years and has consulted in the Licensing Industry for the past 7 years.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Why Good Brand Licensors Sleep at Night – Part 2
I just returned from the International Licensing Expo in Las Vegas. While I was there, I was able to participate in Licensing University and run some seminars; one of which was Best Practices in Corporate Trademark Licensing. I met a fair amount of people who are new to brand licensing at the show and it was clear to me that this blog post: Why Good Brand Licensors Sleep at Night – Part 2 is long overdue for many. In my last post I spoke about the organizational structure of your Licensing Function being absolutely critical to your overall long term licensing success. Well in Part 2, I am cutting to the chase. You want to know the main reason I slept at night when I ran AT&T’s brand licensing program for ten years? I had outstanding Legal support and a world class Quality Assurance Function. To me, that is where the rubber meets the road in successful brand licensing functions. It was no accident that I had great support in these two areas because I went out to find, lobby and recruit that support.
My main legal support was Frank Politano, AT&T’s Senior Trademark Counsel. I really did not know just how skilled Frank was at brand licensing until I sought him out to see if he could support the proactive expansion of our Brand Licensing function. You see at times Trademark Lawyers may not have a lot of experience in actually doing Trademark Licensing. In Frank’s case, he was a tremendous resource for me as he had so much experience he has actually co-authored a book on the topic for Aspen Law: Drafting License Agreements, now in its Fourth Edition. I also negotiated supplementary legal support from my licensing agency as well. It was up to Frank to manage and utilize those additional resources. He did this quite often. I cannot stress enough the value of having a great Trademark Legal team to insure your contracts are drafted in such a way as to fully protect you as the licensor. Fortunately for me, Frank actually left AT&T and is now available for hire to all in the licensing industry at K&L Gates.
The other critical aspect to my being able to sleep at night when I ran AT&T’s licensing function was having a world class Quality Assurance function. Because of the nature of our program, we did a lot of licensing in the consumer electronics category. My first thought was to see if I could find a resource internally at AT&T Labs that could perform this type of Quality Assurance. I was lucky enough to find some Electrical Engineers who had spent 20 years designing and doing quality assurance for AT&T branded phones and cell phones. They were more than eager to help me. They were trained as ISO auditors and in Six Sigma Quality processes. I was able to pay them an annual fee to do all my quality assurance. Eventually, AT&T laid them off so they formed Quality Assurance Management Inc. www.pqam.com . The company is run by Jeff Lumpkin. Jeff has a passion for Quality Assurance. This blog post is really the brain child of Jeff as he used to introduce himself as “the reason I sleep at night”. He used to say that he didn’t sleep at night so I could. At the end of the day, Quality Assurance is the bedrock of any long-term successful Brand Licensing Program. Poor product quality has ended many licensing relationships prematurely and indeed, ends many Corporate Brand Licensing programs abruptly as well. So if you are building a brand licensing function, take the time to find extremely qualified Quality Assurance resources. Ideally, you want professionals who are trained in ISO and Six Sigma compliance, have a passion for product quality and have an engineering or quality testing background.
When people ask me the key to successful Brand Licensing Programs, I tell them its making sure you secure and utilize strong legal support and quality assurance functions from your program’s very start. Why? So you can Sleep at Night!
Mike Slusar
Managing Director & Owner
Brandar Consulting, LLC
email: mike@brandar.com
“Helping Brands Reach for The Stars”
http://www.brandar.com/
copyright © 2010 Brandar Consulting, LLC All Rights Reserved
My main legal support was Frank Politano, AT&T’s Senior Trademark Counsel. I really did not know just how skilled Frank was at brand licensing until I sought him out to see if he could support the proactive expansion of our Brand Licensing function. You see at times Trademark Lawyers may not have a lot of experience in actually doing Trademark Licensing. In Frank’s case, he was a tremendous resource for me as he had so much experience he has actually co-authored a book on the topic for Aspen Law: Drafting License Agreements, now in its Fourth Edition. I also negotiated supplementary legal support from my licensing agency as well. It was up to Frank to manage and utilize those additional resources. He did this quite often. I cannot stress enough the value of having a great Trademark Legal team to insure your contracts are drafted in such a way as to fully protect you as the licensor. Fortunately for me, Frank actually left AT&T and is now available for hire to all in the licensing industry at K&L Gates.
The other critical aspect to my being able to sleep at night when I ran AT&T’s licensing function was having a world class Quality Assurance function. Because of the nature of our program, we did a lot of licensing in the consumer electronics category. My first thought was to see if I could find a resource internally at AT&T Labs that could perform this type of Quality Assurance. I was lucky enough to find some Electrical Engineers who had spent 20 years designing and doing quality assurance for AT&T branded phones and cell phones. They were more than eager to help me. They were trained as ISO auditors and in Six Sigma Quality processes. I was able to pay them an annual fee to do all my quality assurance. Eventually, AT&T laid them off so they formed Quality Assurance Management Inc. www.pqam.com . The company is run by Jeff Lumpkin. Jeff has a passion for Quality Assurance. This blog post is really the brain child of Jeff as he used to introduce himself as “the reason I sleep at night”. He used to say that he didn’t sleep at night so I could. At the end of the day, Quality Assurance is the bedrock of any long-term successful Brand Licensing Program. Poor product quality has ended many licensing relationships prematurely and indeed, ends many Corporate Brand Licensing programs abruptly as well. So if you are building a brand licensing function, take the time to find extremely qualified Quality Assurance resources. Ideally, you want professionals who are trained in ISO and Six Sigma compliance, have a passion for product quality and have an engineering or quality testing background.
When people ask me the key to successful Brand Licensing Programs, I tell them its making sure you secure and utilize strong legal support and quality assurance functions from your program’s very start. Why? So you can Sleep at Night!
Mike Slusar
Managing Director & Owner
Brandar Consulting, LLC
email: mike@brandar.com
“Helping Brands Reach for The Stars”
http://www.brandar.com/
copyright © 2010 Brandar Consulting, LLC All Rights Reserved
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Why Good Brand Licensors Sleep at Night – Part 1
I know from my many years of running AT&T’s brand licensing program that it can be tough to learn to live with the risk that is associated with licensing your company’s most valuable asset; its brand. While I was licensing AT&T’s brand to other firms to use on their product or service, I had to live with the fact that if my licensee screwed up, AT&T’s brand could be severely damaged in the marketplace. And that damage could be very visible to my senior management. I always lived under the mantra that I was one bad licensing deal away from ending AT&T’s brand licensing program. The reason I made this connection was because I knew that the royalty revenue I could earn AT&T from my licensing program paled in comparison to the monetary damage one of my licensees could do to the AT&T brand. You see royalty revenue is usually a drop in the corporate ocean of revenue and with AT&T generating $123 Billion in Revenue annually, my tiny royalty stream was less then a drop, it was a molecule. Hence, if any of my deals ended extremely badly, it would probably mean the cancellation of my licensing program entirely and the end of my career at AT&T. While I was running AT&T’s program, one of my contemporaries at a competitive company met this fate when the wife of the CEO of that firm noticed one of their licensed products in a close-out bargain bin at a Consumer Electronics retailer. She bought the product and shared the story and the product with her husband. It was the end of the brand licensing program at that firm and the end of that Brand Licensing Director’s job.
So that begs the question, why did I assume the Director of Licensing role at AT&T and bare that level of risk. The simple answer is that brand licensing done well can be tremendously successful, rewarding personally and value-added for your company both in terms of brand building and revenue generation. The problem is that it takes tremendous vigilance and hard work to do brand licensing really well. And far more deals fail then succeed. The key is working hard to build a licensing organization around you that is filled with extremely talented people all working toward the common goals of: 1) attracting only the best licensees to your brand, 2) choosing the right categories to enter into, 3) doing extremely thorough due diligence to choose the “right” licensee, 4) negotiating a thorough contract and 5) proactively managing & partnering with your licensee to insure their marketplace success. If you do all these things well, you sleep well at night. BUT you must surround yourself with the right team to make that happen. This is not to say your team always sleeps well at night. ;-) There are always going to be issues to manage, but if you pool the risk of brand licensing around a talented licensing group, everyone is better able to manage that risk appropriately and succeed. The key is how you build that organization.
More on that next time in Part 2 of this thread.
Mike Slusar
Managing Director & Owner
Brandar Consulting, LLC
email: mike@brandar.com
“Helping Brands Reach for The Stars”
http://www.brandar.com/
copyright © 2010 Brandar Consulting, LLC All Rights Reserved
So that begs the question, why did I assume the Director of Licensing role at AT&T and bare that level of risk. The simple answer is that brand licensing done well can be tremendously successful, rewarding personally and value-added for your company both in terms of brand building and revenue generation. The problem is that it takes tremendous vigilance and hard work to do brand licensing really well. And far more deals fail then succeed. The key is working hard to build a licensing organization around you that is filled with extremely talented people all working toward the common goals of: 1) attracting only the best licensees to your brand, 2) choosing the right categories to enter into, 3) doing extremely thorough due diligence to choose the “right” licensee, 4) negotiating a thorough contract and 5) proactively managing & partnering with your licensee to insure their marketplace success. If you do all these things well, you sleep well at night. BUT you must surround yourself with the right team to make that happen. This is not to say your team always sleeps well at night. ;-) There are always going to be issues to manage, but if you pool the risk of brand licensing around a talented licensing group, everyone is better able to manage that risk appropriately and succeed. The key is how you build that organization.
More on that next time in Part 2 of this thread.
Mike Slusar
Managing Director & Owner
Brandar Consulting, LLC
email: mike@brandar.com
“Helping Brands Reach for The Stars”
http://www.brandar.com/
copyright © 2010 Brandar Consulting, LLC All Rights Reserved
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