Trademarks are an important way to protect your business name, logo or style.

A trademark is a symbol or logo that distinguishes a product or service. The British Intellectual Property office deals with about 28,000 trademark applications a year.

Trademarks are believed to have originated from bakers around the middle ages. Once the bread was made, but before it was cooked it was stamped with a seal that identified the baker, so that he could be punished if the bread was not good or underweight, but if the bread was of a consistently high standard, he would generate a lot of goodwill towards his bakery.

Today a trademark can be a name such as Coke, or a symbol such as McDonalds famous Golden arches, or it could be a combination of the two - it can even protect a shape or a particularly distinctive colour.

For consumers trademarks allow them to make informed decisions about which products to buy, because different trademarks are associated with different qualities in a product. For instance a product from Volvo would be associated with the term “safety” in most consumers minds.

If you have an unusual store name or business idea its a good idea to look into trademarking it. This costs around £200 and takes approximately a month to process at the patent office’s headquarters in Cardiff. The office also have a fast track process for £85 that allows you to see if your mark is eligible or likely to infringe upon another previous mark.

Bear in mind when searching that trademarks are allocated per classification, so that for example working in steel would be a different classification to use in the gift trade.

You can search online for free for other similar businesses and logo’s to see if yours would be eligible for a trademark. A trademark is a valuable business asset and help with a positive business evaluation.

Once you have a trademark you can use the registered trademark logo, which effectively deters others from using your trademark and generating business from the goodwill you have developed in the running of your business.

Visit the office for intellectual property rights at : www.ipo.gov.uk for more information.

Tags: Trademarks

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 10:27 am and is filed under Trademark, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.