Using IP for Dummies
An excellent tool for:
- education & outreach
- marketing
- generating referrals
“Quite possibly the best marketing tool available for IP practitioners.”
Education and Outreach
Intellectual Property Law For Dummies is a great education and outreach tool.
There is a great public appetite for information about intellectual property. Most people have heard of IP (patents especially) but very few people know even the most basics things about it. If you have a mandate to support and encourage entrepreneurship and innovation you will find the book extremely helpful and cost-effective. It is a short, accessible, and effective introduction to the fundamentals of IP. For instance, the book is an excellent compliment to seminars on the basics of IP – whether your audience is students or CEOs.
Users who find it effective include:
- Economic development agencies with a mandate to support entrepreneurship and innovation
- Incubators & accelerators
- Technology transfer officers
- In-house counsel conducting training
Marketing and business development
The book is also an extremely useful marketing and business development tool for a wide range of users. Some of the reasons that the book is so effective include:
- They get noticed.
- They are light and easy to store, ship and distribute.
- People do not throw books out. They truly have a long ‘shelf life”.
- They are easy to find when needed – the For Dummies brand is one of the most recognizable brands in publishing in the world, and for a field like IP where someone may not have a need ‘right away’ a long lasting, easy to find, marketing product is very important. Your contact information can then be found readily, when it is needed
- They are great conversation starters.
- They are very cost-effective.
Some of the people who can use these most effectively for business development purposes include:
- IP attorneys
- Corporate attorneys
- Technology transfer officers
- Economic development officers
Use them to generate referrals
Of particular note for IP practitioners is the value of these books as an excellent tool for engaging with your referral network. If you want referrals, it really helps if you start by giving folks something that helps them. Asking is a poor way to start; giving is a better way to start a relationship. “Giver’s gain” is a great mantra. However, that is hard in IP – what do we have to give away to start the relationship?
If you want high quality referrals, help your referral network educate and triage clients about the basics of IP – you get more referrals from folks who actually need your services. If you give someone books which they in turn use to support their education, outreach and marketing initiatives, you really gain that person’s attention and their thanks, and thanks leads to referrals. We strongly recommend that you try giving the books in bulk to in-house attorneys, corporate attorneys and technology transfer officers for their use as they see fit. No strings attached, ‘I thought these might help you’ is by far the best way to go. This is our favorite way to use the book because of the leverage it provides: less time, less money, better quality referrals.
Information on ordering the books is found here.
Neil