Emerging market multinationals hunting for trademarks: what happens next?

Emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) have been very active in acquiring both firms and their strategic assets in developed economies. Among these assets, intellectual property (IP) is particularly salient, as the control of these intangibles typically comes with a stronger position in global value chains. Hence, EMNEs often acquire IP to upgrade their capabilities and improve their economic position and reputation in international markets.  The extent to which EMNEs benefit from these IP acquisitions and their post-acquisition IP development, however, remains a conundrum for scholarship and practice. This paper focuses on EMNEs acquiring USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) trademarks and investigates their post-acquisition IP development, specifically the extent and quality of their new trademark filings. We develop an original theoretical framework where we combine performance feedback theory with international business theories. In this framework, we investigate the effect of EMNEs’ performance and reputational gaps relative to their aspirations on post-acquisition IP development and we explore the factors that moderate those relationships.  To address our research questions, we  develop an original database of USPTO trademark assignments involving a sample of Global Fortune 2000 firms from emerging countries or their subsidiaries between 1981 and 2014. Our preliminary results suggest that EMNEs with higher gaps will tend to be more active in new trademark filings after the acquisition of a focal trademark, but the age of the acquired trademark moderates those effects.