Companies are frequently found registering new trademarks or modifying existing trademarks as part of their rebranding efforts. Several reasons such as the change of company management teams may explain why rebranding decisions are made. No empirical research has focused on understanding the rebranding activities of companies. This project aims at resolving this mystery using both the trademark registration data and the business data (from the Securities and Exchange Commission disclosures.)

The main purpose of the data collection is to focus on publicly traded companies and to collect longitudinal information about these companies on trademark rebranding activities; company profiles; other company level information that may be correlated with a company’s decision on rebranding. With the help of the data, we will conduct in-depth analysis and various visualization to help answer the following questions.

Research questions:
- What kind of companies, in what situations, are engaged in name rebranding? How does this change across time?
- Are name rebranding activities by public companies likely motivated by economic, legal, or other factors?

View our work here

Term
Fall 2020
Topic
Social Sciences