Planning Intellectual Property for Marketing Strategies in the Digital Content Industry

Abstract

New Technologies and hypercompetitive market environments have motivated industries and innovators to understand the crucial importance of intellectual property rights. The value and quality of intellectual property is achieved through the use of intellectual property combined with marketing strategies on a worldwide scale. Therefore, it is vital that the role of intellectual property in marketing is sufficiently understood. \n\nHowever, most people are still not aware of the relevant problems. One problem is that the subject of planning intellectual property as an effective tool for marketing has been rarely analyzed in previous studies and accordingly has not even been covered in the field’s education system. The other problem is the lack of any intention in industries to use intellectual property systems or intellectual property as one means of innovation. \n\nConsequently, the applications of intellectual property and relevant rights certainly are under-valued and under-exploited. In addition, the most influential technology in the 21st century—the Internet—has turned many businesses upside down, especially in the digital content industry. Also, a digital content product shall not be defined as a tangible asset nor an intangible asset because there are rights from the intellectual property system for the origin of the product—“content” and other rights from the Civil Code for the product itself, these rights make a digital content product become a unique asset. Therefore, the digital content industry is the chosen subject for this research.\n\nObviously, there is a need to distinguish between what actions of planning intellectual property for marketing strategies make the company fly up or dive down and what kind of concerns should be checked. Therefore, this research discusses what kind of preparations a digital content company has to make in order to implement strategic intellectual property management; be able to exercise intellectual property for creating profit; and to determine the most effective application of intellectual property for marketing strategies. Accordingly, this research provides a model for planning intellectual property for marketing strategies. Also, this research hypothetically expands the application of the 4C structure, which is used to distinguish where to pay attention while planning intellectual property for marketing strategies, and so provide useful ideas to the rights owner. After all, if a company makes changes to its organizational infrastructure, this could quickly bring substantive benefit to its economic performance. Furthermore, this research takes Google as an example, since its impact can be seen in news and reports almost everyday, to test the hypothesis and model in this research and to demonstrate how a company can have the opportunity and ability to create economic value from its intellectual property.\n\nFinally, the preliminary conclusions of this research include:\n(1) intellectual property concepts should be applied in “marketing” and vice versa;\n(2) the most primary concept for strategic intellectual property management is an organizational infrastructure integrating the groundwork of IP management;\n(3) the 4C structure can be used to analyze decisions of planning and exercising intellectual property; and\n(4) a digital content product can be analyzed through the product life cycle and the 4C structure.