It can be quite tricky trying to choose a specific trademark that can help you to make your products and services stand out from others. The goal is to avoid making your brand similar to other’s trademarks and your trademark needs to be entirely distinctive. Trademark registration needs to protect your product and services like a huge shield and a sharp blade. It means that you can use your registered trademark in an offensive and defensive manner in the courtroom against the infringer. Unfortunately, there are some mistakes that you may still do during the trademark selection process. As an example, you may think that you can avoid a problem by changing a few letters of the existing trademark and brand name. If your trademark could potentially cause confusion there’s a possibility that it won’t be approved. As an example, choosing Nutrasugar for your powdered sugar product may cause confusion with the existing Nutrasugar brand name. The public should be able to immediately notice differences between brand names.
A partial change won’t be enough, because people could still associate your product with the more popular ones. Legal decisions for approving your trademark and brand name will involve a test to determine the likelihood of confusion. The degree of confusion may increase if your products are related or in the same category with competing products. Another mistake is using generic name for your product. As an example, you can’t simply use “orange” for your orange juice product. The name must be unique enough not only to differentiate you from the competitors, but also the generic name of the product. Generic names are in the public domain and it means that no one is able to claim them. Many products have unique names, such as Apple for smartphones, tablets and laptop, which is unrelated but currently considered as one of the most well-known electronic consumer product brand names in the world. It is common for companies to try to describe their products through the trademark and taglines, but we should never use any kind of brand name.
Another mistake is registering your surname as the trademark. It is important to be aware that surnames can’t be registered as trademarks if there’s no a secondary meaning. For better results, it is important to investigate your case before choosing. In this case, investigation should be the key and you need to make preliminary search on the Internet. By choosing the right kind of brand, you could potentially save a lot of money in the application procedure. Some companies even make mistakes by using unregistered brand name in marketing campaigns and advertising. This could prove to be a very expensive mistake if the use of the brand name is denied due to specific problems. It means that brand name registration should be one of the first things that you need to do before the first product leaves the manufacturing facility. Changing a brand name due legal issue could cause you to lose a lot of loyal customers.
