A trademark is the mark, logo or trade name which identifies your business to your customers. Even if you don’t realize it, everyone deals with trademarks on a daily basis. “Trademark” is another way of referring to brands. A trademark registration is valid all over India.
Even though the registration of a trademark is not compulsory, it has significant advantages:
1. Trademarks are an effective communication tool.Trademarks can convey intellectual and emotional attributes and messages about you, your company, and your company’s reputation, products and services. Your trademark doesn’t need to be a word. Designs can be recognized regardless of language or alphabet. The Nike “Swoosh” design is recognized globally, regardless of whether the native language is Swahili, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Arabic or English.
2. Registration of the mark creates a presumption of your ownership of the mark. In case someone else violates your trademark, it is much easier to proceed against them if you own a registered trademark. If you are an online business, your trademark would usually include your domain name. In fact, getting a trade mark for your domain name is the only effective way of protecting against people who use names sounding similar to yours to get some of your traffic – the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) dispute resolution process is pretty much out of the reach of the average Indian entrepreneur.
3. Registration in India will be needed before registering your trademark in other countries.
4. You can only use the ® symbol if you have a registered trademark. (Note if your trademark is not yet registered, you can put ™ symbol next to it).
5. Your trademark and your goodwill is an important part of the value of your business. Any serious investor would do an intellectual property (IP) audit to check whether your IP is sufficiently protected.
6. Trademarks make it easy for customers to find you. The marketplace is crowded and it’s hard to distinguish your business from your competitors. Trademarks/brands are an efficient commercial communication tool to capture customer attention and make your business, products and services stand out. Customers viewing a trademark immediately know who they are dealing with, the reputation of your business and are less likely to look for alternatives. Your brand could be the critical factor in driving a customer’s purchase decision.
This is a guest post by Nischal Mittal, Founder of indiaadvisorz
