A trademark is a badge of origin and enables customers to distinguish between competitor’s products or businesses. Effectively trademarks provide individuality from the mass market. They present an important image of quality, exclusivity, youth, fun, luxury, adventure, glamour or other reputedly desirable lifestyle attributes not necessarily associated with specific products but capable of presenting a strong marketing message in itself.
Providing a trademark is registered with the intellectual property office and is appropriate it will be protected within the UK meaning that any infringement of the trademark is easier and less expensive to establish than other areas of redress such as the tort of passing off. Simply put, if you can register your trademark then do so!
Registration of a trademark is a process which must be given careful thought and consideration in order to ensure firstly that the trademark actually accomplishes registration, and secondly that the trademark registration is sufficiently watertight in order to protect all dimensions of the valued badge of origin.
Registration of a trademark is crucial to securing the integrity of your product or business. The logo that you place after your trademark serves to warn free riders or copycats that you are serious about your business or product and that anyone attempting to ride the coat tails of your good will and hard endeavours will have to answer to the Courts.
Imagine that you start a business, for arguments sake let’s say an online website design business. Your company spends a lot of money on the business, it becomes successful and ultimately you build up a good reputation and you create goodwill for your business. As you are an online business the forefront of your marketing is based online and therefore you spend a lot of money on search engine optimisation in order to stand out from the crowd. Your brand is now recognised locally, but because you have failed to register your badge of origin as a trademark there is no reason why another company couldn’t copy your logo designs etc and use them as their own. Obviously this would create confusion for your customers and would have a detrimental effect on your business. You may have redress through the tort of passing off, but it would be much easier and cost effective to just register your trademark through the IPO.
Registration provides evidential security that your trademark belongs to you and no one else. You can even register a trademark for as little as a few hundred pounds!
