When you are interested in conducting a consumer research study to gather evidence that may strengthen your Lanham Act claim, take advantage of the extraordinary expertise of Keegan & Donato Consulting.
Keegan & Donato Consulting provides nationwide trademark litigation services and collaborates with plaintiffs and defendants on a wide variety of marketing and complex commercial litigation issues, including consumer research, damages analysis, forensic economic analysis, and related areas.
Principals Mark Keegan and Tony Donato have over 25 combined years of experience in consumer surveys in the context of intellectual property disputes, and have worked with many well-known firms from coast to coast, including Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP in Los Angeles, Riemer & Braunstein LLP in Boston, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in New York, and Reed Smith LLP in Chicago.
Lanham Act Claims
The Lanham Act, as codified in 15 U.S. Code §1125, is the statutory basis for most trademark claims, and the issues raised are particularly well-suited to testing through consumer research surveys.
Trademark owners who claim infringement and unfair competition are generally required to establish two elements: (1) that the defendant used the registered mark in commerce; and (2) that the use is likely to cause consumer confusion.
A likelihood of confusion survey conducted by Keegan & Donato Consulting will address the issue of consumer confusion from a scientific perspective, providing direct evidence of the extent to which consumers believe that certain brands emanate from the same source or are somehow related.
Our firm has designed and critiqued hundreds of likelihood of confusion studies to ascertain whether consumers are confused by a party’s use of a contested mark.
Importance of Methodologically Sound Surveys
Courts often regard consumer surveys as persuasive evidence of likelihood of confusion in trademark infringement litigation and TTAB proceedings. However, surveys may be given little weight or excluded from evidence if poorly designed.
To demonstrate the importance of hiring qualified survey experts in support of your case, consider Elliott v. Google, Inc., 45 F. Supp. 3d 1156 – Dist. Court, D. Arizona (2014), in which the Court excluded the plaintiff’s surveys, deeming them unscientific and poorly constructed, and rejected the survey expert as unqualified “to design a survey or to interpret survey results.”
To satisfy judicial and adversarial scrutiny, Keegan & Donato Consulting adheres to survey design, execution and presentation best practices. Our consumer surveys direct objective, non-leading questions to an appropriate universe of consumers. Procedures are in place to minimize potential biases in data collection, and our services include a full analysis and reporting of survey data.
We have designed hundreds of consumer research studies across many different industries with an objective of obtaining high-quality information from a representative sample of the targeted population. Survey samples are obtained from prominent marketing research companies that maintain multi-million-member online consumer panels.
Call Keegan & Donato Consulting at (914) 967-9421 to find out how a consumer research study could help strengthen your Lanham Act claim. We will design a survey to target relevant consumers in your client’s market and determine how these consumers perceive your client’s brand.