Should you Register a Trade Mark?

Knowing When to Register a Trade Mark 

(In Australia we write ‘trade mark’ as two words, in the US its ‘trademark’).

I’ve just been at a Angel Investor and Entrepreneur breakfast. One of the things we were talking about this morning was branding and looking at how to use your branding and how you might leverage your business and change the direction of your business in the future. So, whether or not you actually want to register trade marks now, what trade marks are worth registering? All of those sorts of questions came up.

One of the considerations that you can give before making a decision to register a trade mark or not is:

Where is the value in my business?

So, if the value is in the trade mark, then it’s worth registering. If the value is in some other aspect of the business, maybe you want to invest your money more in that first before you register a trade mark. Just something to think about. For more detail have a look at our guest post on Problogger.com about registering a trademark without hiccups. 

Also, remember that not all things are capable of being registered as trade marks.

General descriptions and place names can’t be registered. We had a client once who said, “Hey, I want to register this trademark and it’s just been rejected by the trademark office. Can you tell me why?” The reason their application was rejected was because they wanted to register something like “Auto Sales, Brisbane“. It’s too generic. There’s no way you’re going to get that registered as a trade mark, because too many people in the same industry need to be able to use those words in that kind of order.

So just remember that not everything is capable of being registered as a trade mark and trade mark registration, although important, may not be your top priority right now.