Strengthen Your Brand and Become Familiar with the USPTO
Web sites, newsletters, side hustles, and more: Learn to research and protect your brand with little or no expense
I spent about a million years in marketing. Aside from making me old and cynical, I took away some knowledge that I want to share with you.
Did you give your website, your newsletter, or your side hustle a catchy name? If you did, there’s a good chance you invented a tradename. A brand.
How free are you to use this new brand? Are there any pitfalls waiting out there?
After you’ve established that your brand is unique, what types of protection are available?
Step 1: Brainstorm your brand ideas
If you are reading this, you are probably the creative type. You are capable of coming up with wonderful ideas on your own. My goal is to help you brainstorm so that more of your ideas pass through the filters coming up.
You will be amazed at how often good, unique ideas have been touched upon by others already.
We are trying to do this with little or no expense, so I aim to keep you clear of any treacherous ground that would require legal help to navigate.
- The overarching rule is “the more unique the better.”
- Come up with several options that you like, because there is a chance that some ideas will fall out in screening.
- Made-up words, creative spelling, and cobbling together some never-seen-before compound words can greatly increase your “uniqueness quotient.”
- Adding your name will increase uniqueness.
Step 2: Search the web
Let’s start with some free searches to determine if we are the first to come up with the idea for this name. If there is a pre-existing use of the name in a similar space, it can come back to bite us later!
It would be heartbreaking to get a “cease and desist” letter from a media company because they are already using the name we chose for our newsletter.
For illustration, let’s pretend I want to start a newsletter about pets called “Professor Whiskers”. I get started with the following searches:
Perplexity.ai search for “Professor Whiskers” (in quotes for exact matches) relevant to any intellectual property or creative works.
Google search for the term “Professor Whiskers”.
This uncovers something. It may be informal, but an author uses a character by this name in songs, books, and videos. Could it be legally allowable? Maybe, but I don’t want to incur legal fees, especially at this early point. My layman’s advice would be to filter out “Professor Whiskers.”
Sorry, but disappointments like this are part of building a trade name.
“Barkhoven’s Fifth” on the other hand produces zero hits. Silly? Sure, but my made-up word pun doesn’t match anything in Perplexity or Google. It may be a brand-new phrase.
Step 3: USPTO (US Patent and Trademark Office) Search
We are going to head over to the USPTO to determine if anyone has legal protection for a tradename that could interfere with our new brand. We are looking for two things:
Similarity to our tradename. Exact matches would be bad, and I would avoid these unless you opt to get legal help.
How closely related are our goods or services? We are asking this question for any partial matches. The further apart our goods and services, the less any name similarity is of concern.
USPTO Search site
Selecting “Wordmark” in the drop-down will restrict results to the tradename. It may be of passing interest, but for the most part, there is no interest in “dead” trademarks so you can uncheck this to narrow down the results. You can also try to “Search by All” to see what comes up, but the focus is on our tradename (Wordmark).
Neither “Barkhoven” nor “Barkhoven’s Fifth” (exact quotes) lead to anything to worry about here. Only the word “Fifth” has some hits when I remove the quotes from our proposed tradename. This is a weak partial match since we are using it with a more unique term. To be thorough, I next type “Newsletter” followed by “Blog” in the box that says “Refine search by goods or services”. There are very few, and none could be in any way mistaken for our brand.
How are we doing so far? Does it look like we have a tradename that is unique enough to use, and different enough from anything that has been filed with the USPTO?
Nothing is 100% proof against a future complaint from somewhere out in the peanut gallery. However, all of our homework thus far has put us in pretty good standing and that risk is low. Certainly 1000% lower than just picking a name and running with it!
It is worthwhile to keep from infringing on anyone else even if we decide to go no further.
Step 4: Is our trade name worth protecting?
The decision to take some additional action to protect our tradename depends on a few factors.
- Is our product or service going to scale to the point where it might be attractive to imposters?
- Are we investing a lot of time, effort, or money into our business?
- Are we making enough money so that the fees for protection might seem reasonable?
Remember your creative work has copyright protection, which we won’t get into today. Deciding on trademark protection is about the brand under which you may offer that creative work.
Step 5: What kind of protection can we seek?
Declaring a trademark (™): You can inform the public that you are claiming a trademark with the superscript ™. This provides notice but no legal protection. Others wishing to avoid conflict may respect this enough to leave your tradename alone. This costs you nothing.
However, you do not have legal protection, and the tradename can still be used by another party. You have not registered, so people searching the USPTO will not find you.
If you go this route, you can decide to register the trademark later if you wish.
Registering a trademark (®): True legal protection will cost you some money. You may also want a lawyer for this, but in some cases, US citizens can file without help from a lawyer.
Competitors with any sense will avoid infringing because you have legal protection. However, not everyone has sense and you may find you have to shell out additional money to enforce your protection.
You will be found in the USPTO database. This is good when it comes to law-abiding competitors. However, there is also the occasional wingnut who will try to scam you after seeing you have filed a trademark. The most typical scam is “My organization found someone infringing on your trademark and we will help you enforce it for $1000” or whatever wording they are using nowadays.
The minimum cost for registering is $250 for one class of goods or services with a fully filled-out TEAS Plus application. You will have to renew periodically. TEAS stands for Trademark Electronic Application System.
Want help filling out the form? The USPTO has taken care of that.
Video Tutorials (I found these to be excellent)
I hope you find some practical use for this information! I initially planned to include logos in this article, but I didn’t like how long the article was getting. If there’s interest, let me know and I’ll cover logos in the future.
