Trademarks are vital assets for modern companies. When there are tons of competitors out there with similar products (sometimes with cheaper prices), brand identity is everything. Consumers will often choose to stick with a brand they know and trust before they risk spending their money on a brand that is less costly or more convenient.
What happens, then, when there’s confusion between two brands? Similar trademarks can put a more established brand at risk of harm to its reputation and sales. That’s where consumer confusion surveys can prove useful.
They’re research tools that can help with trademark disputes
Essentially, consumer confusion surveys are designed to measure the likelihood that a consumer might mistake one brand’s products or services for another’s due to similarities in their trademarks.
Consumer confusion surveys generally look at situations that accurately reflect where confusion might occur through questions that are clear and unbiased. They are also carefully targeted to specific demographics of consumers who would actually use the products or services of the affected company.
Data from consumer confusion surveys might be collected online, via phone interviews or even face-to-face interactions, then analyzed to determine what percentage of consumers would confuse one company for the other in practice. If there’s a high percentage of “confused respondents,” that can turn into very powerful and persuasive evidence that one trademark is infringing upon the other.
While there are a lot of different factors that courts examine in trademark disputes, consumer confusion surveys are often given a lot of weight – but they are not without their challenges. Poorly designed surveys can skew the results and leading questions can make the data questionable. If you’re involved in a trademark dispute, it’s important to explore all of your legal options as quickly as possible so that you prevent your company’s reputation from being tarnished.