As a growing business you are almost certainly investing a lot of your profit in building and developing your brand and you need to be thinking about protecting that investment. Trade marks are not only a concern for large companies, growing businesses and famous/well known individuals may also benefit from registering their trade mark or their personal name. This protects their brand identity from being used by competitors large or small.

Owning a trade mark allows your business to stop other businesses using your name to promote their business. A trade mark provides legal protection that allows you to recover damages or an account of profits. In the latter case you are able to recover all profit made by the business through the use of your trademark.

Apart from the legal right to prevent others from capitalising on your brand and the investment you have made in it, the trade mark itself becomes an asset with its own value. A trade mark is valued not only by the amount you have invested in promoting it, but also by the market perception and its positioning, notably amongst consumers, which could increase the value of your business. A strong brand can allow you to charge a premium on your product or service and generate more sales.

Trade marks can be virtually anything that is unique to your business, product or service. Trade marks can include words, logos, colours, smells, shapes, packaging or any combination of these, as long as they can be described in writing. The more unique your trade mark is the more likely that your trade mark would be accepted for registration.

Your trade mark should consist of a distinctive word (or group of words), logo or other sign that would clearly identify your goods or services from other traders.

For example if you sell books, you are unlikely to be able to register the trade mark, Books Direct. The name describes the goods you are selling and the way in which you are selling them, and it is likely that other traders in a similar business would also use these words to describe their product or service. As such the Trade Mark Office would not approve such an application because the wording is too specific. If however, you trade as Zatkor Books Direct it would be considered a distinctive mark and you are likely to be allowed to register the trade mark.

Most business owners believe that owning the company in the name that they wish to protect is enough; however registering a company name gives very little protection against imitators - that can only be achieved by registering the name as a trade mark.

Before applying for a trade mark and before investing in the promotion of a new business or product name it is recommend that you conduct a trade mark search to check that your proposed trademark does not conflict with an existing identical or similar mark. Otherwise you may find the name you choose is not legally available.

Applying for a trade mark does not require any specialist legal training; you can probably do it on your own. However, trade marks are grouped into classes and when you apply for registration you will need to know and decide which class of registration suits your type of business. You may want your registration to be in more than one class or to restrict your registration within one particular class. It can sometimes require expert knowledge to correctly determine the right class for your trade mark. You may also require specialise legal advice should the examiner that looks at your mark raise any objections, or your trade mark is opposed following publication in the Trade Marks Journal.

If your business will be based solely in the UK you can apply for a UK trademark alone, if you trade in Europe, a European trade mark covering 25 countries within Europe might be of interest. If your business is truly international, you would be well advised to consider applying for an International trademark which allows you to specify relevant countries.

Typical costs for registering a trade mark are £285 + VAT for legal fees and £200 + VAT for the Registry Fee. Not much considering you’ve probably spent considerably more just printing your name or logo onto your stationary!

For further information about trade marks, trade mark searches and trade mark registration visit: UK Trademark Applications .

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