Everyone makes purchases which are strongly influenced by something called branding…the values associated with a product that go beyond the thing you’re nominally paying for. Trademarks are one long-established way for product makers to protect the investment they have made in developing their brand.
Trademarks have a commercial value…today’s invention is a way to quantify this.
Images of products, with their normal trademarks and badges attached, would be displayed via a website to a given, statistically representative, audience (within some chosen demographic group). The same products would then be shown to a different audience but having had all such identifiers digitally airbrushed out.
People would be asked to identify, by multiple-choice box ticking, which brand corresponded to which product (the trial could be made into a contest in order to attract sufficient interest to be meaningful). The results would be compared between the two groups to determine which trademarks were most recognised and therefore valuable.
This could be extended to tests in which the wrong marks were applied to products (eg a Jaguar badge digitally applied to a Ford car…would people notice the mismatch? Does rebadging really transfer brand values?)
