How to make a mint? Try giving it away first

How do you get people to remember who you are when you are attending, or indeed sponsoring, a sizeable international intellectual property conference. Not many people spend their time fretting about this and, of those who do, scarcely any are likely to be practitioners who run their own solo or small-size practice.

Our colleague Michael Factor was faced with the "how to make your mark" issue at this week's "From IP to NP (net profit)" conference in Tel-Aviv, which you may have read about via various posts on the IPKat and one (on generating value from patents) on IP Finance -- or which may have crossed your line of vision via the Twitter hashtag #ipnp.

What could he do to conjure up a lasting impression on a hard-bitten audience of conference-goers? Mouse mats are at last out of fashion; pens even more so. Notepads are so low-tech these days and packs of repositionable adhesive notelets are somehow unable to convey the right impression in a world that is increasingly moving towards paperless and electronic documents and materials. Getting your name on the conference carry-bag can be very costly; picking up the tab for a reception likewise.

Anyway, rather than fall back on the safe but unexciting recourse to handing out a side of A4, extolling the virtues of his practice, patent attorney Michael chose to insert in each delegate pack a box of PCTea-bags ("for peace of mind with patent services"). Herbal infusions are not everyone's cup of tea, but a box of bags will usually last much longer than a sponsor's bar of chocolate.

This unusually tasty, if not also tasteful, goody is the sort of marketing tool that can do really well: people tend not to throw away a box of green tea and mint infusions, and will be more likely to give them to someone else at work than to jettison them entirely, given the presumption against throwing away anything that can eaten, drunk, stuck on a fridge door or pinned to a wall.  The box is therefore potentially a persisten reminder of Michael's continued existence and indeed of his appearance since his IP Factor caricature image appears on it too.  Whether this memento works, and serves to bring in new business, or whether on the contrary it puts people off green tea and mint infusions, remains to be seen.

Can readers point to any other imaginative and ideally affordable ways of making a mark at a big event?

Reflections on the Entrepreneur Market

As Global Entrepreneurship Week draws to a close for this year, I thought it might be interesting to reflect on the young entrepreneur as a market for intellectual property advise. There is, no doubt, a need but there is no market. The need is satisfied well by The UK IPO who provided lots of resource and encouragement including a special page. Both ITMA and CIPA were represented at the British Library Business and IP Center event. The idea is that by making entrepreneurs aware of the availability of professional advice they will buy it at an appropriate stage and avoid the worst traps in the meantime by using the free search tools for the UK and Europe and advice. Sadly the Business Link combined company name and trade mark checker tool launched in 2008 has now gone the way of all things Business Link. This is a shame it was the best basic starting point but it does leave the Entrepreneur who relies on Google market vulnerable to the factory filers who sell on price but are of necessity more expensive than filing direct with the UK IPO yourself.
The challenge we, as individuals, face in this Internet led market is to emphasise the value of personalised advice and the wisdom of experience and training validated by a professional body.  For this personal networking is a better bet than Google Ads. The ITMA/CIPA non-core skills training team is offering an event which may interest some of you. Its a webinar so you won't see me there and, being such, I don't expect it to cover face to face networking in any great depth. If anybody is willing to offer a review for this blog, that would be great.

Selling for Solos

There is no shortage of marketing advice out there. Everyone seems to be prepared to offer me some service to develop my professional image and bring in new clients. Our Professional Bodies ITMA and CIPA are offering a Webinar that will tell us how to do it and it seems we have come a long way from the days when a brass plate and a tombstone advert in Yellow Pages were considered daring. Even the EPI consider that European Patent Attorneys can advertise

Advertising is generally permitted provided that it is true and objective and conforms with basic principles such as integrity and compliance with professional secrecy.

IPREG insists

Publicity and promotional activity of any kind by regulated persons is permitted if it is fair, honest, accurate and is not misleading and is not otherwise in breach of these Rules.

Networking - some of our bigger competitors are enjoying an #AIPPI2012 trip to Korea at the moment, article writing, and websites are now the norm.

This blog's co-found Shireen Smith of Azrights has gone one further in adding value to advertising material and is selling her educational and informative book to her target audience.

Our competitors are banding together in marketing groups like Quality Solicitors, who are also producing jolly TV adverts that can gain even greater publicity by social media, such as this.

While these methodologies may be perfect if you want to grow your business and recruit, they may not be ideal if you want to maintain a steady workload. For that, perhaps we need to nurture our existing clients and work referrers. Of course if you have been too successful with the marketing techniques, you can perhaps pass some on to another SOLO practitioner.

I would love to see some comments on how others are managing to control the workflow.