Companies are increasingly protecting their tags used to mark products and services across social media
While it’s the objective of most brands to get consumers to join the conversation, companies are increasingly weary of the competition “joining” in as well.
According to recent story in the Wall Street Journal, companies are progressively filing trademark applications for hashtags related to their services or products across social media in order to protect their intellectual property.
Research by Thomson Reuters CompuMark showed that 1,398 applications to trademark hashtags were filed around the world in 2015. That number has been growing steadily since 2010, when just seven companies applied for hashtag trademarks. A recent examples includes #sayitwithpepsi, which was registered in Europe last year by PepsiCo.
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