Posted on

Linking Marketing and Sales with Kimberly Davis

Kimberly_DavisHaving previously covered social media (The Marketing Master Class – Social Media for Business), Kimberly Davis kindly invited me along to the third in her Marketing Masters Series. And this time the topic was Linking Marketing and Sales.

Kimberly started with a very simple definition; Marketing is anything that represents your company.

Marketing vs Sales
–    example of a football team – team is the marketing effort – the striker is the sales
–    Better if different people due to different goals
o    Marketing – long term – brand building – consistency – impersonal
o    Sales – short term – translates interest into a sale – personal (one to one)

Fear of sales
–    If your product is good, you are doing them a favour by telling them about it.
–    It’s is just a conversation – not a sales pitch
–    People buy from people they know, like and trust

Company name
–    You should be able to say what you do in two words
–    Forget witty tag lines that say nothing
–    Example – Campbell’s condensed soup – Sasparilla marketing detoxification

Target market
–    Forget your gut instinct – you can’t sell to everybody
–    Who is your ideal customer?
–    Create a profile for them – age, race, interests, position, salary etc

Selling the right thing
–    What is going to make you the most ROI (return on investment)?
–    Are you selling the right thing to the right people?

Identifying need
–    Where does it hurt for your customers?
–    Solve a problem
–    People buy what they want, not what they need.

Focus on the benefits
–    What are your benefits?
–    What problem can you solve?
–    How can you make their life easier?

Unique Selling Point
–    What are you USP’s?
–    Be ‘the only …’
–    Focus – If you try to be everything to everyone, you will be nothing to no one

The Elevator Pitch
–    It is the most important thing in your marketing strategy.
–    You have twenty seconds to make an impact.
–    Can you clearly articulate what you do in that time?
–    People will decide whether to file or forget you based on this.
–    No more that two short sentences long.
o    Who, what, why when and how?

Communication
–    Find the right words to use
–    Keep it simple
–    Focus on fears and needs
–    Read it out and hear how it sounds
–    Test it on lots of people and get feedback
–    Ask them to say it back to you to see what they remember

Kimberly’s elevator pitch for Sarsaparilla:
50% of marketing is wasted. Sarsaparilla is a marketing consulting and training agency that specialises in marketing purification – the process of detoxing your marketing, protecting you from The Flash, Fluff and Fakers, and helping you make more money with less.

  • Sales across the Marketing Umbrella
  • Branding
  • Business cards
  • Literature
  • Social Media
    .com
  • Merchandise
  • Eshots, flyers, emails etc
  • Website
  • Testimonials
  • Advertising

PR
–    Getting other people to say it for you

Networking
–    Time to use your elevator speech
–    How to get in out of a conversation – ‘I don’t want to keep you from networking with other people here’… Don’t be too obvious
–    Business Cards
–    Carry a nice pen – cheap pen = cheap company
–    Think beyond the person in front of you – they may know someone relevant
–    Ask for what you want – they may be able to help
–    Pay if forward
–    5 minutes per person

Ways to measure your return on marketing investment
–    Take an inventory
o    List of clients and what they buy from you
o    Review you client profile
    How many
    Average spend
    Repeat clients?
    Their profile – hobbies, interests etc
    When they buy
    Why they buy
    Survey with SurveyMonkey
o    Do your market research – not with family and friends
o    Gives you a starting point for measurement

  • Creating a process (funnel?)
  • Positioning
  • Permission Marketing
  • Incentivise your customers
  • Data capture
  • Generating new leads
  • Ask why people aren’t buying
  • Cost of customer acquisition
  • Retention / Customer service
  • Multiple revenue streams
  • Reminders
  • Experiential marketing

Pricing
Referral and Affiliate plans

Stop selling and allow people to buy from you

Find a mentor
A Hobby or a Business?

Sharon Wright and Magnamole 

Kimberly’s keynote speaker for the final slot of the day was Sharon Wright, who’s claim to fame is delivering the best pitch in the history of Dragons Den.

–    Took one day off in the first year of developing the idea.
–    Single parent entrepreneur
–    ‘Think big and you will be big’
–    Decided to start with the biggest BT
o    2 hours of negativity
o    6 Sigma proof required
o    Would be virtually impossible
o    Had never been done before
o    One positive – the product had legs

–    First paying customer was with Cromwell tools – told them BT was a buy (a bit cheeky)
–    From creation to market within 6 months
–    Strong self belief is 1st important ingredient for business success
–    Aim was to be the best presenter on Dragons Den – achieved this goal
–    Preparation (2nd key ingredient for business success)
–    Practiced her three minute pitch 100 times a day for three weeks
–    Read all of the Dragon’s books to help choose which partner to go with
–    After the show was aired Sharon received 7,000 emails
–    Was now working 22 hours a day, seven days a week.
–    Loneliness of starting a business (3rd key ingredient)
–    As time went on her self belief began to drop
–    Met Tony Larkin at the British Inventors show who offered to invest in her
–    Sharon has now sold her Magnamole to an American company keeping a 10% holding.

–    The most important lesson learnt was to trust her instincts, and get a business mentor. You are often too emotionally close to your business to make objective business decisions.

–    Story reminds me of one of my earliest blog posts on Dragons Den
Dragon’s Con.

Sharon’s book ‘Mother of Invention – How I won Dragons Den, Lost my mind, Nearly lost my business and ended up reinventing myself’, tells of her personal struggle as a single mother, inventor and entrepreneur.
It has been reviewed on my colleague Steve Van Dulken’s Patent Search Blog.

Posted on

Visit from the School of Communication Arts

School of Communication ArtsYesterday I hosted a visit for thirty students from the School of Communication Arts. I have to admit I had not heard of the school before, but have been very impressed by Marc Lewis their enthusiastic Dean.

I was initially a bit intimidated by presenting to such a young and dynamic audience, but they gave me an easy ride, and seemed genuinely interested in what the Library and the Business & IP Centre had to offer.

The school have created a great Prezi slide show to explain how they are different.

And here is an introduction from their prospectus:

Have you noticed that the best ideas are usually so simple that it is hard to believe that it took so long for someone to conceive of the idea in the first place?

School of Communication Arts is unique for so many reasons. Here are three things that make it such a unique place for you to launch your career;

A student to teacher ratio of 1:6 (that’s six teachers to every student!!). Every teacher is a top creative practitioner. Which means that our students develop a powerful network of valuable contacts whilst developing their abilities.

An entirely new vocation (Ideapreneur). This has captured the imagination of the advertising and venture capital industries. So much so, that some of our Ideapreneur students will receive £10,000 of funding for their start-ups whilst at the school.

An accredited curriculum written by practitioners using wiki tools. This simple idea enables us to teach the most up-to-date knowledge, which is essential in such a fastchanging world.

There are plenty more ways in which The School of Communication Arts is considered to be the leading school for advertising, some of which you will find in this prospectus. But the thing that sets us apart, more than anything else, is our cohort.

I wish you good luck in winning a place at the school. If you are successful, you are on a fasttrack to a very rewarding creative career. All the best, Marc Lewis

Posted on

Looking forward to a greener New Year with my Keep Cup

Just before the holidays our intranet announced that we could ‘buy a reusable cup and receive 10 free hot drinks’. This was part of the Library’s commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility.

I was keen to try it out, and have been using my Keep Cup for a couple of weeks now, and am very happy with it. According to their blog, Pret have also recently trialled the Keep Cup.

The cups, available in a range of colours, cost £6.00 but customers receive 10 free hot drinks as an incentive.  The disposable cups that the Library uses for its takeaway hot drinks have a waterproof waxed coating that means that they cannot be recycled. As part of the Library’s on-going initiative to reduce waste, Peyton & Byrne have identified a product that will reduce the amount of takeaway cups used and provide staff with a better quality takeaway hot drink.

The KeepCup is a high quality reusable cup manufactured from the safest food grade plastic. It is for use with either hot or cold drinks. It has a sealable lid and sipper hole and is pleasing to drink from with the lid either on or off.

It is thermally insulated, keeping coffee hot for 30-40 minutes longer than a disposable cup. Each cup also has a thermal silicone band to ensure the cup can be carried comfortably and safely.

Posted on

Inventing the 21st Century exhibition closes this week

It’s the final week of our free Inventing the 21st Century exhibition so if you want to see it you will have to get a move on.

We invited visitors to the exhibition to submit on slips of paper their ideas for what inventions were needed and  had a big response. Mark Sheahan, our Inventor in Residence, has listed his favourites on the Invent it ! web page.

My colleague Steve van Dulken is the curator of the exhibition and has already covered several of the inventions on show in his excellent Patent Search blog.

Steve has also written a book Inventing the 21st Century to coincide with the exhibition.  In the book he covers the inventions in the exhibition and many more. My favourite is the Magmole invented by Sharon Wright. I love the fact that it is such a simple solution to such an annoying problem (pushing cables through cavity walls).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC5QvKE4yHw]

 


Posted on

Ingenious Britons: Personal journeys in invention and design

Last night’s Inspiring Entrepreneurs featured successful inventors and was organised in conjunction with our wonderful Inventing the 21st Century exhibition.

Our five speakers gave us their very different stories, but with common themes and lessons learnt.

Natalie Ellis, inventor of the Road Refresher non-spill dog travel bowl.

Natalie Tried for many years to get into the pet market. She came to The British Library about eight years ago and immersed herself in our market research reports and pet related industry  information. This gave her the knowledge to understand the market and be able to sell effectively to supermarkets like Sainsbury’s.

This is a message I repeat to all of my clients in advice sessions. If your background is not from the sector you plan to launch your product or service, you must first gain in-depth industry knowledge by reading relevant publications, and even gaining some work experience where possible.

The idea for Road Refresher came from nearly being arrested by the police, for trying to let her dog drink water while driving her car. Natalie built a very basic prototype in her kitchen in the evenings while waiting for her daughter’s dinner to cook. As is almost always the case, her initial prototype didn’t work.

She displayed her final product at a trade show and generated interest there. This encouraged her to enter a women’s invention awards competition, where she won three awards, which led to BBC news coverage. Next came the fateful invite to appear on Dragons Den. Apparently the unusual chairs the Dragons sit in, make them look small and insignificant, which inspired (misplaced) confidence in Natalie. As anyone who has seen the clip will know, the experience turned out to be awful, with personal attacks from the Dragons due to Natalie’s lack of knowledge of the size of her market.

James Caan’s reaction to her plan to take the bowl to America, was to warn Natalie that America was the graveyard of British business. All successful inventors and entrepreneurs have ‘bounce back ability’, and so a few days later when she had stopped crying, and realised she believed in her product, she decided to ignore the Dragon’s advice.

She flew to America and took a stand at a trade show, and had initial difficulties selling the product, but by the time the Dragons Den show appeared on television, it had become the fastest selling dog bowl in America on Amazon.com.

Q&A

Q. Did anyone offer to licence the product?

A. She was offered a 3% licence and turned it down. The moulds are made in China, but by a company recommended by a personal contact.

Q. How to present your product to potential buyers?

A. Natalie demonstrates her product by waving a full bowl in front of potential buyers faces, and watches their reaction when no water spills onto them.

Mike Spindle, inventor of the revolutionary Trekinetic Wheelchair

Mike has a Formula 1 racing car background, but despite a lack of knowledge of the wheelchair sector or disability background he developed all aspects of the Trekinetic. He said the key is noticing the problem, and the poor current solutions in the market to address it. He thinks his lack of industry knowledge and decision not to review existing solutions or patents helped him find a truly  innovative solution.

The initial trigger was seeing a trendily dressed young man stuck in a terribly old fashioned wheelchair, painted purple in a failed attempt to jazz it up.

Mike’s advice was first check existing solutions in the market place. Then sketchyou’re your solution, and build at prototype or test concepts using Meccano. Concentrate on function first, looks come second. Ultimately the product must sell itself. A big marketing budget will only take a mediocre product so far.

Don’t spend a fortune on prototypes, you can do a lot with MDF. Try and keep what you are doing as private and secret as possible.

Ask yourself if anyone will buy it. Mike gave the example of collapsible paper basket invention. Ingenious, but not ultimately not that useful.

Can you patent your idea? Use non disclosure agreements (NDA’s) to test out invention. They found a set of wheelchair users and gave them a questionnaire to fill out.

Beware of patent agents as their time is so expensive, and they want to write your application straight away, before searching the databases to see if you qualify.

You only have one chance to get it right, so make use of help from Business & IP Centre  and the UK IPO.

If you believe in your idea, don’t give up – make it happen.

Mike’s crunch point was when he discovered the chair wouldn’t run in a straight line. It took a year to fix, but is now the best on the market and can be used one handed wheelchair occupants.

The wheelchair took six years of his life, but was worth it, and now the demand is greater than they can produce.

The key is to find customers that love your product and competitors who can’t copy it.

Michael Pritchard, inventor of the Lifesaver bottle

Michael started off by agreeing with the Natalie and Mike that it does feel very lonely at times when you are inventing.

He told us the story by the Lifesaver, which came about because he got angry during Boxing Day 2005 watching images of the Tsunami on television. People were dying due to a lack of clean water, so he decided to do something about it. But as is so often the way, work and life took over, and he didn’t pursue the idea. Then came hurricane Katrina, and the same problems again with lack of drinking water. He was appalled that it took five days to get water to the thousands of people stranded in the Superdome in New Orleans.

Needed a solution that did not require chemicals or power.

Michael then gave a very polished demonstration of the Lifesaver bottle, using very murky and smelly water from the bottom of his pond.

He talked passionately about his recent visit to Pakistan and used his own photos to show the extent of the flooding and its impact on the people there.

He said how great it felt to realise that giving them a Lifesaver jerry can took the place of a dependency on a regular supply of bottled water.

His motivation was a vision of his gravestone with nothing written on it. Also his wife told him to go for it.

Q. You on the stage tonight are the lucky ones.

A. Michael disagreed, the invention must meet and unmet need, but must also be commercial.

Jim Shaikh, the inventor of  Yoomi, self heating baby bottle

Jim was the father of a three and half month weight premature baby. Jim’s job was to feed the baby at night, but kept getting the temperature wrong. Ended up with crying baby and crying wife upstairs.

It took a year to develop the concept, a bit like a combi-boiler and a gel-pack hand warmer, re-packaged into the top of a baby feeding bottle.

It has taken six years from original idea to get into Boots and soon into Europe.

Marketing tag line ‘Inspired by Mum, Designed by Dad’.

Wants to build a brand as it is more valuable than individual products.

Jim learnt about IP in the Business & IP Centre, and raised £140,000 from Angel investors. He made the very important point that a patent is an asset that helps convince investors of value of product.

It took a year to get funding for the product.

Prototyping is expensive. Jim used it to prove to investors that his product was a worthwhile investment. Took 3-4 prototypes to get the product right.

You need a support network to help you out.

You will hit low points, but part of being an entrepreneur is being able to deal with problems.

You need to be aware that competitors will respond, in Jim’s case with price cuts. How will you respond back? Do you have the flexibility?

Mark Sheahan, the Business & IP Centre’s Inventor in Residence

Mark used his immense experience of inventing and advising inventors to come up with a list of Do’s and Don’ts of inventing:

Keep your idea secret

Has to be better and or cheaper than the rest of the market

Have a professional patent search done

Review the prior-art, and carry on searching

Do your market research – players, size, prices

Is the market I am going into worth the time money and effort

Can you make the invention, and for the right price?

Look at how you can add value with your product

What is your USP? Why kill one rat when you can kill a hundred?

Helps to be optimistic

WIT – Whatever It Takes

Your enthusiasm will become infectious

Has to become the most important thing in your life

You need to become good at business

Understand the role of IP and patents

Secrets have a role to play

Don’t write your own patent – it is a false economy

Avoid sharks – not just the rogue Patent Promotion Agents

Listen to your gut feelings when dealing with people

Take on a business mentor with a couple of percentage of your business.

Create a SWAT analysis

Choose the right business model – draw up a partnership agreement

Don’t expect money from banks or government grants.

Make yourself investable – develop your marketing line

Understand contracts and letter writing

Get good at negotiating

Be realistic about the time scales – 15 years in the case of Dyson

Experience is rewarding even if you fail

Have fun with it

Questions

Q. When should one extend a British patent to a wider market?

A. Jim S – A difficult question as it is expensive to go wider. Need to think about where your market will be. Babies are born across the world. Strategy was to nationalise their patents in their biggest markets (USA and Europe).

Michael P – Find out where your competitors are manufacturing and patent there.

Q. How can you use a patent as collateral?

A. Jim S – I put in my patent into the business in exchange for investors money.

Q. Why not licence your product?

A. Mark S – I prefer to licence my technologies.

A. Michael P – Increase the value, decrease the risk by outsourcing the manufacture, but keeping control of selling and marketing of product as it is so new in the market. Wanted to build the value first.

Q. How did you foster partnerships and collaboration to get your invention market?

A. Natalie E – all self done

A. Jim S – used friends and family as focus groups, but using NDA’ and CDA’s. Balance between protecting what you have but getting valuable feedback from potential customers.

Q. The difference between being an inventor and an entrepreneur.

A. Natalie E – work to your strengths – go to trade shows to find the right

A. Mark S – licensing is a quicker and cheaper route

A. Michael P – get product into market as early as possible – don’t show a picture, have a prototype

A. Mike S – if you are going to licence your invention, make sure you get a serious amount of money up front to ensure they are committed.

Posted on

JOT-it down as another success story for the Business & IP Centre

It is quite a special feeling when one of our clients from our Business & IP information clinics successfully brings their product or service to market.

In this case, Bob Bhatti had a meeting with my colleague Jeremy O’Hare, way back in November 2008. And he and his business partner Scott Lindsay have pursued their vision since that time, attending a range of our workshops and seminars. They also had an Ask the Expert session with our Inventor in Residence Mark Sheahan. And our commercial Research Service ran patent prior art and trademark searches to help in protecting the intellectual property of the product.

According to the Jot-it Facebook Page, they have just finished exhibiting at the London Gift Fair and are building up a very healthy order book.

Yet again I am amazed that such a simple idea has not been seen before and wish Bob and Scott the best in their exciting business adventure.

What is JOT-it™

JOT-it™ is a handheld product providing maximum writing area on a standard A7 size recycled, pre-printed note pad. It is accompanied with a recycled mini pencil, a pound trolley token to release the shopping trolley from the trolley loan mechanism, has an embedded magnet on the rear for typical fridge attachment and an integrated clip on the rear to clamp the complete device to the shopping trolley handle bar.  This feature also incorporates a high friction rubber pad to provide a robust attachment with minimum effort. All these supplementary items have moulded-in clips on the main body to keep everything organised and together.

With JOT-it™, individuals can generate a shopping list over the course of the week on the notepad using the mini pencil. This notepad is pre-printed with a checklist of the most popular grocery items whilst still leaving a generous amount of space to add additional items. When the user is ready to visit the supermarket, they can take the JOT-it™ along with them.

Once at the supermarket, the user faces another issue of finding a one pound coin to insert into the shopping trolley loan mechanism. The JOT-it™ provides a pound coin widget with a unique thumb grip feature allowing the user to grip the widget securely and remove it successfully each time. It is often found that coins once inserted are not easily retractable due to the minimum grip available.

The JOT-it™ can next be clipped to the shopping trolley handle bar and rotated accordingly to provide a good reading angle. There are no limitations to this adjustment. Again, the mini pencil ( which also has a holder on the front of the unit) can be used to mark off items if the user wishes to and once this shopping trip is complete, the user can dispose of the used leaf and start a new one for the next trip.


Posted on

Our new free Inventing guide is out

As part of our Inventing the 21st Century Exhibition we have produced a free Inventing pdf guide which is now available on our website.

The guide summarises the key stages of taking an invention to market, and contains a handpicked list of websites, organisations and resources that will help you find what you need to know, and fast.

My colleagues have gone to a lot of trouble to find useful sources as well as explain some aspects of Intellectual Property (IP) in plain English (which is easier said than done).

Is your invention original?
It is important to search to see if anyone has already published or used a similar invention to your own, as this may mean that you cannot protect it. You can conduct a quick search yourself using free websites. However, we recommend that you gain advice from an expert to help you with your search and consult a patent attorney to advise if your invention is patentable. It takes 18 months for a new patent publication to be published so occasional checking on recently published patent specifications is also a good idea.

It also makes mention of my current favourite type of IP – Trade Secrets, as exemplified by the Coca-Cola formula.

Trade secrets and confidentiality agreements
Trade secrets and confidentiality are not covered by standard intellectual property law but can be useful for things  which are not easy to formally protect, such as internal business procedures, recipes for food and business contacts.  They last for ever if you manage to stop them leaking, so keeping a manufacturing process secret can give you a longer-lasting  monopoly than a patent.

You automatically have a right to sue somebody for breaching confidence if: the  information is not already common knowledge; it was disclosed to the other person in conditions that implied that  they should keep it confidential; and you have suffered, or are likely to suffer, actual damage because of the disclosure.  Having a formal non-disclosure or confidentiality agreement is often a safer option.

We also produce a general business advice pdf guide we call Business Essentials.

Posted on

Inventing the 21st Century Exhibition Evening

Last Wednesday night was the formal opening of our Inventing 21st Century exhibition by BIS Minister Mark Prisk. He talked about the British Library and the Business & IP Centre in glowing terms which was nice.

During the evening I chatted to a range of inventors and business support advisers, but my most memorable conversation was with a man in a K-2 Wheelchair featured in the exhibition. He explained how using it had changed his life for the better. It was inspiring to see how an invention can make such an impact on the lives of people.

The BBC has put together a slide show of the exhibits featured in the exhibition.

On Saturday morning, Steve Van Dulken the curator of the exhibition was interviewed on BBC Breakfast News with the inventor of a double headed broom.

Steve has also written a book Inventing the 21st Century to coincide with the exhibition.

Posted on

Our exhibition: Inventing the 21st century

From next Monday our new exhibition Inventing the 21st century, opens here at the British Library in our Folio Society Gallery, and runs until 28 November 2010.

It is a celebration of wonderful British ingenuity, and contains a wide range of inventions from sport to tackling climate change to the weekly nightmare of changing your duvet cover. It also includes President Obama’s favourite dog bowl (as seen – and rejected – on Dragons Den), and Dyson’s revolutionary bladeless fan.

My colleague Steve van Dulken is the curator of the exhibition and has already covered several of the inventions on show in his excellent Patent Search blog.

We are also running an Ingenious Britons evening event, where you will be able to hear from and put questions to some of the inventors.

In conjunction with the exhibition we also have an Invent it! campaign. We want to inspire the next generation of ingenious Britons to develop products to make your lives easier, from a mug of tea that never goes cold, to a smart phone battery that can last all week. Personally, I would like to have a stretchy keyboard for my Blackberry, as I can touch type, but my clunking fingers are far too big for the standard BB keys.

What would you like to see an invention for? Have your say on our Facebook fan page and Twitter using the hashtag #bipcinvent

We’ll be announcing the top ten ideas during Global Entrepreneurship Week (15 – 19 November).

Posted on

Who owns the rights to the vuvuzela?

The vuvuzela may be the most annoying musical instrument to be manufactured in recent years. Not only does the buzzing sound have the ability to drown out the crowd and commentary in World Cup matches, the sheer 120 decibel volume of noise at close range can lead to permanent hearing loss. In fact a new model has been introduced with a modified mouthpiece the reduces the volume by twenty decibel.

The popularity of the vuvuzela is spreading to the UK, with Sainsbury supermarket stocking 40,000. And I have even heard the distinctive sound of the instrument around my village during warm evenings. With anything selling in the hundreds of thousands the intellectual property is worth protecting.

In this case the ownership of the idea is claimed by Freddie Maake:

Vuvuzela creator blown off?
Popular Kaizer Chiefs supporter Freddie “Saddam” Maake, who claims to have created the instrument, is an angry man and feels sidelined from the lucrative spin-offs of his “hard work”. He vows the rights of the vuvuzela belong to him and went on to put up a convincing argument for why he should receive royalties from all the companies that produce the horn… Maake’s anger about his loss in earnings is directed at Neil van Schalkwyk, the co-owner of Masincedane Sport in Cape Town. He accuses the 36-year-old businessman of “short changing” him after an earlier undertaking to share the proceeds. “He is making a killing out of my hard work while I starve,” says Maake. Masincedane has gone into partnership with a German company to produce the vuvuzela ahead of the 2010 World Cup. “Journalists from as far as England and Mexico have visited me here and say that I should be rich, but look at me.”

Africa: Doubts raised over vuvuzela trade mark
There have been a number of press reports recently on the issue of who owns the rights to the vuvuzela. In reviewing the fuss and bother around this quasi-musical instrument, it is not clear whether these parties are claiming rights to the trade mark vuvuzela, or the rights to the product itself. Be that as it may, it is instructive to look at the history of the vuvuzela.

One Freddie Maake, a fanatical Kaizer Chiefs supporter, claims he was the first person to create a vuvuzela, albeit an aluminium version in the 1970s. Maake claims that in 1999, with the assistance of Peter Rice, he produced a plastic version of the vuvuzela. He claims that until the late 1990s he was the only owner of a vuvuzela and the only user of one at soccer matches. In 1999 he launched an album called “Vuvuzela Cellular” which features this instrument.

Neil van Schalkwyk, a director of Masincedane Sports, a company that has been manufacturing plastic vuvuzelas since 2001, is also claiming rights to the name vuvuzela.

The Nazareth Baptist Church has now also stated that the trade mark Vuvuzela belongs to it. It claims that it has been using the vuvuzela since 1910.

However, no one has done the groundwork required to give effect to ownership of the vuvuzela. There are no valid patents or designs registered in respect of the musical instrument that is now called the vuvuzela.

Even if this instrument could have formed the subject matter of a design or patent registration, the opportunity of doing so has long come and gone. The only question now is who, if anyone, is the owner of the Vuvuzela trade mark.

According to the records of the South African Registrar of Trade Marks, 40 trade mark applications, by numerous persons and entities, have been filed over the past eight years for the registration of trade marks incorporating vuvuzela. These trade mark applications are in relation to a wide variety of goods and services.

One of the applicants for these trade marks is Rory Peter Rice (presumably the same person who assisted Maake with the manufacture of a plastic vuvuzela), who in 2004 applied for registration of the trade mark Vuvuzela in respect of a “plastic trumpet”. Three days before Rice’s application, Masincedane Sports also filed an application for the trade mark Vuvuzela in relation to “musical instruments”, a Mr Mafokate applied for the registration of the trade mark Vuvuzela in 2003 and in 2009 so also did Messrs Urbas, Kehrberg and Bartels, all German citizens.

All of the vuvuzela trade marks are still pending, which means that at this point in time no single party can claim to be the registered owner of the vuvuzela trade mark in South Africa. Masincedane Sports’ application has been accepted by the Registrar but it would appear that this trade mark is under opposition, presumably by one of the other people who claim to own the vuvuzela. Despite the fact that at this point in time no-one can claim to be the registered owner of the Vuvuzela trade mark in South Africa, the question still remains whether any party can claim to be the common law owner of the trade mark. An internet search revealed that there are many entities or persons making use of the vuvuzela as a musical instrument. It would appear that most, if not all, consumers regard the trade mark vuvuzela as not belonging to any single person.

For example, one can buy vuvuzelas on vuvuzela.co.za, which would appear not to be linked to either Rice or Masincedane Sports. The website that can be found at boogieblast.co.za also advertises vuvuzelas. There are other websites, such as southafrica.info, which openly state that the vuvuzela belongs to the people. Even if one looks at the website of Masincedane Sports, which can be found at vuvuzelas.com, there is no claim on the website that the company regards itself as the owner of the vuvuzela trade mark. In fact quite the contrary: on its website Masincedane Sports appears to use vuvuzela in a sense to indicate that no single party can claim a monopoly on the name.

The South African Trade Marks Act provides that a mark that consists exclusively of a sign or indication which has become customary in the current language is not registrable as a trade mark. In short, a word that is used by all and sundry to describe a particular thing cannot be protected as a trade mark as the word has become generic.

It would appear that the trade mark vuvuzela is used by the people of South Africa to describe a type of musical instrument. It can therefore be argued that the trade mark vuvuzela has become generic and that no single party will be able to claim ownership of the name vuvuzela when referring to the musical instrument.

Carl van Rooyen, Spoor & Fisher, Pretoria, South Africa

Vuvuzelas: 10 things you need to know about the fans’ World Cup instrument

1. A vuvuzela is a blowing horn approximately 1 m in length commonly blown by fans at football matches in South Africa.

2. To blow a vuvuzela you need some lip and lung strength to produce a loud monotone sound.

3. Practised players can generate an awesome 127 decibels when blowing the horn.

4. Researchers even claim to have found evidence that vuvuzelas can lead to permanent hearing damage

5. Where the word vuvuzela comes from is hazy with one theory being that it came from the Zulu word for making a vuvu noise. It is also a township slang word for shower.

6. The vuvuzela is unique to South Africa and is an emblem of hope and unity for many.

7. It was originally made from a kudu horn and it’s claimed in South African folklore that in the ancient days, it was used to summon people to gatherings.

8. The sound made by a vuvuzelas has been compared with “a stampede of noisy elephants, “a deafining swarm of locusts,” or a giant hive of angry bees.”

9. Kaizer Chiefs FC fan Freddie “Saddam” Maake claims he invented the vuvuzelas in 1965 by adapting an aluminium version from a bicycle horn after removing the black rubber to blow with his mouth. He later found it to be too short and joined a pipe to make it longer.

10. Ronaldo has hit out at the sound of the vuvuzelas saying: “It is difficult for anyone on the pitch to concentrate.”