Beyond Your Brand: Why Every Business Needs a Trademark
If you own a business and care about its reputation and want to see it grow, you need a trademark. A registered trademark is a valuable asset for a business to own. A trademark should not even be a question for anyone who wants to protect their business from counterfeit products or imposters. A trademarked name, logo, and/or design, brands all of your products and services and conveys intellectual and emotional attributes.
A trademark may be any word, name, slogan, symbol, device, package, design or combination of these that serves to identify and distinguish a product from others in the marketplace. If someone attempts to use any of these which are “confusingly similar” to your trademark, you can protect your revenue stream by preventing competitors from trespassing within your market space.
Beyond the national rights a registered trademark provides and the use of the trademark symbol ®, a trademark lasts forever as long as the mark is used in commerce. That means you can sell your trademark should you wish to do so. Without a registered trademark, you only have state or common law rights, meaning your rights only extend to the geographic area where the trademark is used. This can be problematic when you want to expand the business. Trademarks are surprisingly inexpensive to obtain and maintain. While the cost of investment in a trademark is minimal, the return on that investment is great. In addition to facilitating consumer choice within a market, trademarks:
● Make it easy for customers to find you, especially in a crowded market
● Allow customers to search for you on the Internet and social media platforms
● Facilitate success by creating brand recognition, especially beneficial for startups
● Not only maintain market share but help business growth
● Are intangible assets dominating valuation in mergers, acquisitions, sale, and licensing
● Can be obtained for goods and services which you plan to offer in the future
● Avoid expensive and time-consuming rebranding to avoid litigation by a registered trademark owner
● Safeguard against cybersquatting 2
How Frier Levitt Can Help
Frier Levitt works with clients across the country in the valuation of pharmaceutical, medical device, and biologic intellectual property for a variety of purposes including capital projects, mergers and acquisitions, litigation support, investments, tax matters, and financial reporting.
Our team includes seasoned Intellectual Property attorneys. We have the technical capability to perform the work using complex valuation methodologies and the credibility to defend our work. We deploy IP knowledge to create smart value for clients. For further advice on creating and implementing a proactive trademark and Intellectual Property (IP) portfolio for your business, contact us to speak to the Frier Levitt IP Team.
Interested in Learning More? View our IP Webinar!
Access our on-demand webinar “Trademarks, Copyrights, Patents and Trade Secrets: IP Strategies for Creating Competitive Advantage,” presented by Registered U.S. Patent and Trademark Attorney Martha M. Rumore, Pharm.D., Esq.
| 2 |
Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. 15 U.S.C. § 1125(d),(passed as part of Pub. L. 106–113) established a cause of action for registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name confusingly similar to, or dilutive of, a trademark or personal name.
|
