…and what do they mean to marketers?
You see the little floating letters everywhere: ™ or ®. Occasionally an SM slides in there, as well. But what do the different symbols mean, and can you just find the right keyboard shortcut, and type it at the end of your brand name and call it a day? Trademarks are a vital part of protecting your business and your brand, but for marketers who didn’t take the bar exam, they can seem daunting.
What is a registered trademark?
According to the International Trademark Association (INTA), a registered trademark is “any word, name, symbol or device that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others.” As an example, if we were to think about the trademark of an up-and-coming burger chain, it could be a word (Big Mac), logo (golden arches), slogan (I’m lovin’ it) or package design (a Happy Meal bag). These are all trademarks of an upstart company called McDonald’s.
There’s also something called service marks (SM), that are essentially trademarks for services instead of goods.
A more handy definition is to think of it as simply a brand name. And like a brand name, the point of a trademark is to identify a specific product as coming from a specific source. That’s important to the holder to ensure that their product can’t be copied by anyone off the street. But it’s also important to a consumer. They want to make sure they’re getting into a Lyft car, which has all of the rules and guarantees of the rideshare company, and not a Jyft car, a rideshare company started by my friend Jeff, who’s a terrible driver. Trademarks protect the rights of the owners, and the safety of consumers.
That’s why they are legally protected intellectual property. You can’t slap a Minute Maid logo on your sidewalk lemonade stand without a cease-and-desist letter from Big Lemonade. Another interesting fact about trademarks, they are adjectives, not verbs, according to the International Trademark Association. In other words, a photocopier is a Xerox machine, trademarked by the company. But the trademark does not apply to the expression “xeroxing” a document.
Armed with that knowledge, how do you define a trademark for your brand? And what are the steps for registering one?
For the full Trademark article, see our website.
