Licensing & Trademark Protection

A member asked:

What is your position on licensing and protection of the Mensa trademark?

The pat answer is something along the lines of “Gosh, it's our most valuable asset and we should protect it at all costs." Obviously that’s not telling you anything.

We all joined MENSA. It looks like this:

Most of us take pride in belonging to MENSA. We’re not choosing to belong to “Smarties Together” club, or “I Scored High on an Internet Quiz” club. There is something about being able to say “I’m a member of MENSA” that makes us willing pay $63 a year for the privilege.  As it says on the Mensa Brand page ,

“The Mensa brand is our promise to our members and the public that items carrying our name and the stylized-M logo are of the highest quality and are synonymous with excellence in intelligence and life-long learning. Our brand is the heart of what Mensa is and who our members are."

It is a well-established belief, perhaps even a fact (not a marketing expert, sorry), that when a brand becomes generic, the original of it loses cachet and value and has to step up efforts to keep market shares. Imagine if there were twenty different “Mensas” you chose choose to join, Some imply that you scored in the top 2% on a real, respected IQ test and some just indicate that you scored in the top 10% on a cheesy Facebook quiz. One is obviously more impressive and more likely to provide you with connections to other genuinely smart people. How to know which is which? Mensa—the REAL Mensa— would have to spend more on advertising and less for other services that make Mensa fun to belong to.

The point of registering trademarks and copyrights is to keep the product from being misrepresented, misused, and diluted. Beyond pride, there is also actual income at stake. Companies pay AML for the ability to display our name or logo, or to publicly associate themselves with us. The greater Mensa’s “coolness,” the more other companies are willing to pay to cozy up to us.

Currently, our predicted licensing income is around $166K. Our budgeted Name and Logo expense is around $36K. If all goes according to plan, we will spend less to defend our marks than we will earn by licensing them.

But this is where it gets murky.

The Name & Logo team decides just how much effort and money to expend in pursuit of a name or logo misuse based on many factors, such as how wide spread the use is, how likely the confusion, how much it will cost, or how patient we can be with slower and cheaper tactics. I can’t go into details about how we make these decisions, since I don’t want to publish on the Web instructions about “how to take advantage of Mensa.” You’ll just have to trust me when I say that we review, discuss, and pursue nearly everything. Even that decade-old renegade URL (usmensa.org) is not being ignored, though to outsiders it might appear so (despite what the legal experts on the Yahoo lists think, that case is far more complex and potentially expensive than just plopping down a couple grand to file an ICANN complaint. Otherwise, I’m sure Dan—who has not only been on the N&L Committee nearly continuously since 2002, but chaired it in 2003-2005—would have dispatched it easily by now).

We try very hard to take calm, simple steps: monitoring trademarks submitted for registration and lodging protests when we spy one that we feel infringes on Mensa’s rights, reviewing products for sale on Café Press and Zazzle, filling out infringement notices with Yahoo and Facebook and ebay,  scooping up URLs when they come up for renewal, etc. Usually this works. Very, very rarely do we take aggressive legal action or initiate suits. But we will when we have to.

So, my personal position?  We gotta do what we gotta do, and that includes making sure our name and logo—our brand— remains unique and prestigious and that belonging to MENSA remains a source of pride for our members.