Geographic names play an important part in branding, from creating a strong local or regional flair to a mark. As a result, there are several provisions of the Lanham Act that restrict registration to certain types of geographic marks. This post will not dive into the legal details, though – it’s looking at a broader question of popularity. Geographic names often reflect broad cultural significance, like a country name, or very local importance, like city or county or even neighborhood names. This post looks at the popularity of brands that include state names as a part of the mark or pseudo mark.

There is roughly one active trademark application or registration per every 100 US residents, so we’ll use US population vs. state population to find the “expected” ratio of trademark filings related to that state versus the actual numbers. So, we can find which states are most over-represented from a branding perspective, and what other not rigorously-statistically-supported insights we can pull from this data without this blog post taking way too long to complete.

New York did really well, but almost certainly because the city name is boosting the “state” numbers by a ton. Texas is a bit over-represented; no surprise, given the extent of “patriotism” – there is a hole in English, or at least in my personal lexicon, for a state-level equivalent of “patriotism.”

States with multiple larger cities tended to perform worse than comparably sized states with only one major city; it’s likely that city-level affiliations carry more weight in, say, Ohio than in Georgia.

Some tiny states, Hawaii, Alaska, Maine, and Vermont, were really over-represented. At least from a trademark filing perspective, people love those states! In general, smaller states tended to over-perform their expected filings; perhaps the absence of an “alternative affiliation” like a metro center or centers pushes more geographic branding towards a state name.