Protecting Your Brand How? What? Why?

So you've spent months developing the prefect brand name, it sounds great and you've started telling everyone about it. Maybe you've got a little further and you've bought a domain name or registered a company name? Maybe you're really far down the road, you're selling your goods, advertising and looking for investment? If any of this sounds familiar then you need to register a trade mark.

How

Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a single worldwide trade mark and so brand owners need select individual countries for trade mark registration. The only exception to his rule is the EU, where there is a multi-country trade mark which covers all EU member states. This has always been good value (in terms of the 'cost per country') and the UK is included... until Brexit. Essentially the country selection comes down to cost, there's no point investing thousands protecting your brand in a specific country if you don't trade (or manufacture) there however, if you do have a presence, particularly a growing presence, then then the country should be listed in your trade mark portfolio.

Once you've worked out which countries to cover you'll then need to think about the classes of goods and services. There are 45 in all and they deal with everything a business can offer, from car tyres to cultural activities. The idea behind this is that brands should be able to co-exist if they trade in completely different industries. Take for example the trade mark 'PENGUIN', this is owned by a clothing brand in class 25, a chocolate manufacturer in class 30 and a book publisher in class 41. All of these companies can co-exist because they have distinct brands which do not get confused with one another.

What

Now you've got a bit of an idea of which countries and classes to cover the next thing to think about is what to register - in short, there are two (main) types of trade marks, word marks e.g.

'CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN'

and logo marks e.g.

These are separate trade marks and they require separate applications. However, one protects the brand name (the most useful mark in this regard is the word mark, which covers different sizes, font, colours etc) whilst the other protects the way in which it is depicted (if for example, a competitor or counterfeiter decided to copy the logo without using the same words).

As a general rule the bigger your trade mark portfolio, the better, but if you to start off with just one...