How do trademarks help to protect your business?
Your business’ brand identity and intellectual property are invaluable. These precious assets are key to brand awareness, as well as your ability to scale your operations and build out your business with a competitive edge. Moreover, trademarks are pivotal to ensuring you have the appropriate and crucial legal rights over your brand. This blog introduces the importance of trademarks from a business perspective and why enlisting the support of a dedicated trademarks team is more than worth it.
What is intellectual property?
Intellectual property can refer to anything that is created using your mind. Individuals, businesses, or groups of people can own intellectual property. This can range from a story, to a symbol to an invention. You can become the owner of intellectual property in three ways:
- By creating it yourself and fulfilling the requirements to register a copyright, patent or design
- Through purchasing the intellectual property rights from a third-party
- By building a brand and registering your trademark
Types of intellectual property
There are four types of protection that each cover different classes of intellectual property:
- Trademarks
- Registered Designs
- Copyrights
- Patents
What is a trademark?
A trademark is a type of IP protection that gives you legal ownership and the ability to protect intellectual property such as a brand, product name, logo, jingle, words and colours. Trademarks last 10 years at a time. You need to renew your trademark every decade.
Trademark ‘Classes’
When you register a trademark for a certain type of goods or services (referred to as ‘terms’), you register your IP under relevant ‘categories’ or ‘classes’.
What rights does a trademark give you?
Registering a trademark is about more than just ringfencing the right to use your brand name or logo. You obtain the legal right to:
- Sell or transfer the trademark
- Earn money from your intellectual property
- Take legal action against anyone who uses, copies or steals your trademark
Benefits of Trademarks
There are also huge business benefits to registering and managing your trademarks and intellectual property properly:
Brand Identity & Awareness
Trademarks help to properly protect your established brand identity. This gives you the freedom to build out brand awareness, continue to build your brand exposure and protect your reputation.
Peace of Mind
More than anything, registering your trademark gives you the peace of mind that nobody else will obtain the right to use a brand name you’ve so carefully put your business behind.
Value of your Trademark
As you build, scale and establish your business, your trademarks themselves will garner value. It’s important to safeguard their value, especially if you’re looking to sell or merge your business with another later down the line.
Ability to take legal action
Should a third-party use or capitalise on your registered trademark, you have the legal right to pursue legal action against them. Additionally, should someone attempt to register a similar or conflicting trademark, you’ll have the upper hand.
Working with 360 Trademarks
Even if you understand the theoretical value of trademarks, the bureaucracy, registration applications and day-to-day management can seem unachievable when you’re busy running your business. That’s where we come in: our expert trademarks team offers wide-ranging experience and insight across the spectrum of intellectual property. Whether you need support or guidance registering a trademark, keeping an eye on like-trademark applications, managing your portfolio, or expanding your registrations abroad, we’re here to help.
Get in touch to find out how we can help.