Your Trademark Is Not Yours

Shared business names and trademarks are more common than you think.

Facebook caused a stir one year (I do not remember exactly which year) when it applied for a “face” trademark. Yet hundreds of “face” trademarks had been granted before Facebook filed its application. And there are nearly a thousand trademarks on the name “Delta,” for everything from airlines to faucets, kitchens, clothing and electrical tools

This is because trademarks are granted by classification of goods or services as defined in the various international agreements. You cannot own a trademark exclusively and globally. You can only own it for the actual products and services you offer, as registered on the license certificate granted to you by the government authorities that grant such licenses in your country. Then you carry out the required procedures to register the trademark

So you cannot own a trademark exclusively and globally, under international agreements

A trademark is a recognizable sign, design or expression that identifies the products or services of a particular source, for particular activities and companies.

Do you know what brand twins are?

Companies like to think that they are responsible for how people understand their brands. They think, or want to believe, that if they sponsor the best content, place their products in the right sectors, and repeat this based on intensive data from the most expensive analytics tools on the market, they will have a successful brand in hand

But it is much more than that. Brand ownership deals with controlling only three things, and whoever says otherwise knows nothing about trademark law. These three things are: brand creation, identity and perception

Brand creation is the process by which the structure of the brand is formed. What values do I want to convey? How do I convey them, through which images? What do I want people to think when they hear my brand name? How do my product's features align with my ambition? After answering these basic questions, we start building the brand identity.

Brand identity consists of the material and immaterial elements that signal its presence: the logo, the wording, the core of what is said, the retail presence, and everything that shouts in customers' minds “I am here”

Perception is how the brand is anchored in customers' minds. How do they take the content? What do they think when they see the brand elements? Basically, everything that a customer or non-customer knows about the brand