Building National Image

Building and developing industry trademarks is an important content of the National Trademark Programme in the coming period. The programme will focus on supporting enterprises and relying on exporting industry associations with strong collective trademarks to study and apply models of competitive industry trademark development. It will also instruct and support industry associations and businesses to protect intellectual property rights related to potential exports and goods carrying geographical indications in domestic and foreign markets. It will assist industry associations to access financing source, technical cooperation projects and programmes relating to brand development.

 

Mr Do Thang Hai, Director of Vietnam Trade Promotion Agency (Vietrade) under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, said: The Government is deeply interested in building and developing trademarks for industries, especially those with intensive and extensive development that catches the attention of businesses. Branding development will be given priority to sectors of high sociality, labour intensiveness, and big forex earning like rice, coffee, cashew, pepper, seafood and handicrafts.

 

However, Mr Hai also pointed out the weaknesses of Vietnamese enterprises in global competition: “We only focus on branding some products of individual company. Meanwhile, we do not have specific programmes for building trademarks for our world-dominant industries.

 

Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Nguyen Thanh Bien said: Vietnamese businesses’ perception of branding remains limited. They currently only care about exporting raw materials or simply processed commodities in the form of input materials but forget long-term benefits of finished products which strongly require a brand name. They only take care of themselves and lack coordination in building collective trademarks.

 

He added that they do not fully understand that building collective trademarks are their responsibility rather than that of the Government's authorities.

 

Sharing with Deputy Minister Bien’s viewpoints, Dr Nguyen Quoc Thinh, Director of the Trademark Centre of the Vietnam University of Commerce, said: This will be a hard work if Vietnamese enterprises only care about themselves and lack coordination and synchronisation from production to exportation. Many companies have not been standardised; do not strictly follow regulations, and are operating on “short-term profits”.

 

He pointed out that Vietnamese has many proposed collective trademarks like Hoa Loc sweet mango, Lo Ren star apple, Chau Doc fish sauce, Luc Ngan litchi and Thanh Tra grapefruit. However, thus far, there are no concert and determinations to bring these proposals to life.

 

In reply to the question whether businesses need to rely on other parties to build up brands, Deputy Minister Bien said: "Associations will build trademarks with enterprises and the State will provide them with supports in terms of policy, guidelines, finance, media and professional skills, etc.”

 

According to Mr Bien’s speech to the forum, the Ministry of Industry and Trade is working with other competent agencies to discuss the linkage of businesses with associations, local governments, management agencies, ministries and others to map out collective trademark development orientation.