Exclusivity: The One and Only… – Trademark registration will confirm your legal ownership of the name or brand and enable you to stop others using your name for the same, or similar, goods or services. A successful trademark application will mean that you quickly become the only business that can use the name in your sector. This cannot be achieved by domain name registration or by company name registration. Any name you adopt should be legally available, satisfy the criteria for trademark registration and should be registered as a registered trademark without delay. Trademark registration will ensure that you have the exclusive right to use your particular name or brand in your product or service sector in the geographic market for which you have obtained registered rights.
Stay Safe: Avoid Infringement Claims – A successful trademark registration demonstrates conclusively that your name is deemed to be legally available in your market sector and does not belong to anyone else. It generally means that pre-registration searches showed your name to be free for use and registration and that no one else was able successfully to oppose your application. Once you have obtained a trademark registration, the risk that your use of the trademark will infringe the trademark rights of anyone else is vastly reduced. The converse is also true. If you steam ahead and adopt a trademark without checking if it is available, and protecting it by trademark registration, you are running a trademark registration services very high risk that you will sue for trademark infringement by the owner of the mark. This ultimately means court action against you to restrain your use of the brand, and award of damages, confiscation and destruction of infringing stock and heavy legal costs.
Protect Goodwill and Reputation – A strong and memorable brand that is protected by trademark registration is the surest legal foundation on which to build the reputation and goodwill of any business. A business that soldiers on without the benefit of a registered trademark is missing out on a huge commercial opportunity. Strong registered brands (Mercedes, Google, Amazon, iPad, The London Eye etc) quickly pass into the collective consciousness of the world consumer market and become synonymous with quality, consistency and reliability.
Get Noticed: Differentiate Your Business – The main purpose of a trademark is to denote the origin of the products or services to which the trademark is attached. The trademark becomes a badge of origin and quality. In short, the consumer knows where it came from and what to expect. So every business has an equal opportunity to adopt a distinctive brand that it alone owns and protecting it by trademark registration. This enables the business to differentiate itself from every other business in the same market sector. It makes no sense to adopt a name that is already in use, or is similar to an existing name, since this will not serve to differentiate your business from the competition. Your brand should be strong, memorable and unique and, for this reason, invented or quirky words tend to be best.