Tag Archives: trademark

How to Decide on a Niche to Focus on in Your Business

In my podcast Brand Tuned, Successful Brand, Successful Business, Ronnie Fox discussed how focusing on the right niche led to success in his long and illustrious career.

He mentioned that he decided to specialise in a relatively narrow field of employment law when he started his own law firm, doing “golden handshake” work. In those days there were very few exclusively Employment Lawyers. But when the Employment Lawyers Association was formed, the carta of Employment Lawyers grew and grew.

At the same time, he was getting some partnership law work and found that partnership work was very different. It wasn’t really recognized as a speciality on its own at the time. People came to him and said, “well, you went from one partnership to another, you were in a partnership that merged, so you must have learned something about partnership”. And when the number of Employment Lawyers belonging to the Employment Lawyers Association went into the thousands, Ronnie thought he would focus on partnership work and build recognition for partnership as a separate area of expertise.

So, by focusing on an emerging field of work alongside employment law he distinguished himself and attracted a steady stream of work.

Combination of Skills

Tim Ferris in a video discusses combining skills. He suggests we should aim to become specialised generalists and cites Dilbert’s advice of trying to combine a handful of skills that are rarely combined. For example, a computer science degree and a law degree is a great combination.

Of course, you don’t want to dabble in a million things. You should still end up going a mile deep. However, if you spread yourself out across multiple skills that are rarely combined and can be effectively combined you should end up with a unique combination of skills that are sought after.

Tim also covers in that video 3 skills that are highly effective to add to your existing specialism – namely, writing, public speaking and negotiation.

The problems that led me to combine my skills

As an intellectual property lawyer, I identified numerous problems around IP and branding. I’ve written extensively about these in various articles and in my YouTube channel. Briefly, they were as follows

In today’s digital society, the assets of a business are largely comprised of intangibles.
Intangibles like websites, logos, content, trade secrets, names and the like, are governed by intellectual property laws.
Few people understand what intellectual property means, and when it’s appropriate to protect it, even though some people may be aware that it’s important to the value of a business.
Taking the right actions when you create or develop each type of intangible asset is how you ensure you have a valuable business.
Different actions are needed to protect the different IP rights of copyright, trademarks, patents, designs, and know how. In practice, you need to make the right choices, use the right legal agreements and register your rights, such as in names.
Failing to protect IP can render a brand generic, and very expensive to enforce.

So there is widespread lack of understanding of IP laws, and I also noted that people want designs created for their business even before they’re ready with their business plan or business strategy, and some tend to spend a lot of money on branding which will often completely overlook IP.

What to expect from designers and creatives

During my 15+ years in business, I’ve come to know that on the whole, designers who support entrepreneurs with their branding lack a proper understanding of IP laws. Sometimes they have misleading ideas about what can and cannot be protected or owned. That’s not surprising given that IP law is a different discipline. However, their clients don’t realise this. So the upshot is that the IP dimension of branding isn’t adequately addressed, leading to various potential problems for business owners.

Some end up using names that cannot be owned, which holds their progress back, and limits the potential of their business. Sometimes people use names that hadn’t been adequately searched, leading to the occasional disaster, or an expensive rebrand. This could happen either because the clients themselves chose a name without properly understanding the impact of IP laws on their decisions or hadn’t followed the agency’s advice to get a name that was created for them checked out by their own lawyers.

Other problems related to branding are that the client doesn’t secure ownership rights in their logo or in software developed for their website.

By overlooking IP protection or giving a service that did not properly address IP, creatives make my role as an IP lawyer difficult because I am often cast in the role of bearer of bad news, the one the client might divert its dissatisfaction onto.

This naturally led to my decision to combine my skills in IP protection with brand creation so I can help clients and agencies alike with naming and identifying how to create protectable distinctive assets. That’s the best way for a business to uniquely stand out and be seen without being copiable. Combining brand creation with brand protection also means business owners can be properly advised around IP.

Becoming skilled in brand creation

First, I had to get a good understanding of what people need to do when they go through branding.

I have been reading branding and marketing books for years, but now I needed to understand what people needed to do before naming their product or service.

I soon discovered that the terminology in the branding world is maddeningly difficult to penetrate. There is so much jargon, and people use different terms so that you are left wondering whether they are the same or different to something else. For example, some books refer to brand principles, while others make no mention of brand principles, instead, they might talk about brand architecture, or brand platform. In other words, there isn’t even a universal meaning to the terms people use, so that it’s difficult to know what you need to do in order to work out your brand strategy.

The core of branding seems to involve working out your vision, mission and values, that much is simple enough. But there are a host of other details that are confusing. For example, you need to determine your brand promise, and brand personality, or tone of voice. Some people suggest thinking about what you want to leave people feeling, what you want to be known for. Do these mean the same things, I found myself wondering? Is positioning the same as how you want to be known? And what about purpose? This has certainly become a very fashionable ‘must have’ nowadays, but is it going to impact the designs? If so how? Or is purpose more about motivating your team in which case why do some books on branding talk about purpose so much?

Once you’ve worked out what all this stuff means you still need to think about your story, PR, and much more. And then there is the issue of personal branding and its effect on your business. It’s no wonder that small business owners might be confused and not really know who to turn to for their branding.

TUNED Framework

Having spent many years learning about branding, and the last few years trying to decipher all the different terminology in order to work out what currently happens in branding, and what I believe should happen, I’ve gradually created my own unique framework, known as TUNED.

The Tuned Framework combines branding with IP to support entrepreneurs to get a great stand out brand for their business so they can be ready for success. I’ve been very much led by evidence-based marketing in developing this framework. For example, see my blog about Byron Sharp’s work last week. It was really important to me to be objective and to produce a methodology that would move the needle for business owners, using best practice and IP thinking.

Not only does this combining of two completely disparate skills bring extra value to clients, but it also provides a more effective approach to branding by overcoming the numerous problems that now exist.

We now just need to identify entrepreneurs and businesses that understand and value IP so they use Brand Tuned when it’s released later this Autumn, as it will deliver far more for less. I’m teaming up with a fantastic design team and using my own brand as a guinea pig for the visual identity work before launching the final product into the world.

In the meantime, if you want to benefit from the series of introductory webinars I’m delivering then do sign up to the next one which is called Name it Right! It provides a road map to support you in naming your business, products, or methodologies.

How Not to Brand Your Business in the 21st century

The internet has radically changed the rules for most industries, be it news, music, PR, retail or any other you may care to think about. That’s not surprising given the rapid pace of technological development the internet has spawned. Society as a whole is being transformed radically, especially in the wake of the Coronavirus.

And yet many industries are plodding along much as they did in the 20^th century, that is, if they can get away with carrying on as usual. They are adapting somewhat slowly to the shifts in the world that the digital landscape entails.

Lack of awareness of IP

In the years I’ve been supporting businesses with their trade mark and brand related needs at Azrights, I’ve been struck by the widespread lack of awareness about intellectual property (IP).

In today’s world where most assets of a business are creations of the mind – intangibles – that are governed by intellectual property laws, it is striking that people create businesses without first taking advice on IP laws.

It’s like not bothering to get any legal help when opening a physical shop or taking on an office lease.

The problem is that while everyone understands there are legal implications in the actions they take in their businesses which have real world signs, they’re largely unaware that actions such as choosing a name, or an image, or developing an idea have legal consequences, and therefore that IP is intrinsically relevant to their projects.

The core 3 IP rights of copyright, trade marks and confidentiality are relevant to every single business. Every founder needs a basic grasp of IP in the 21^st century.

Even if people are aware of IP, they’re often not aware of the need to take it into account at the right time, which is at the start of projects or new campaigns. This can cause serious problems for some businesses.

People know that tangible property like land requires professional searches and a buying process before developing the land. However, they don’t appreciate that IP such as names or logos or websites are also property so that their ownership needs to be addressed first.

People commonly assume that protection of IP is something you can safely leave till your business has taken off and is wildly successful, or at least until you have something worth protecting. This is possibly how the assumption has arisen in the world of branding that protection comes after branding and visual identity creation, rather than before.

This notion that IP comes last is completely misguided, and inappropriate in the 21^st century when the assets of most businesses are largely comprised of intangibles.

The fact that the internet makes business global, and visible means that IP actions we take are out there for all to see, and if we’re infringing on someone else’s rights, it’s likely to be found out in a way which just didn’t happen pre internet, and in the days when there were fewer businesses out there.

Think of IP such as a brand name as you would a plot of land that you are going to develop. While with physical property you might understand how to assess its quality, and suitability for your purposes, with intangibles like names, you may not realise that the same considerations apply as with land, that it’s possible for an experienced trade mark lawyer to conduct searches, and advise on the suitability of a name for the brand you are intending to build.

Brand names

Whether people choose their brand name themselves or have help from a service provider during branding, one common mistake is to use non-distinctive names that are difficult to protect. The purpose of a name and its role in business is to stand out and protect you against competitor actions that very likely to arise if your business succeeds.

IP is how you protect yourself against various realities of business life, such as copying, and trying to steal market share from those who are successful. When choosing names, people are purely focused on whether their name communicates what it is that the business offers, what services it carries out and the like.

If you want to communicate what the business does then unless you can do it in a very clever way, you would do better to use the tagline for that purpose, rather than the name itself.

Clubcard which I’ve previously highlighted such as in the first episode of the Brand Tuned podcast, is an example of a non-distinctive name. It was developed for Tesco’s loyalty card scheme. The name proved not to be a good container of the value the business generates.

Tesco spent millions promoting the Clubcard name, only to discover it couldn’t be secured as a word trade mark for loyalty card schemes. When a word is deemed insufficiently distinctive to function as a trade mark, it means everyone else can also call their loyalty card schemes Clubcard in this example. Effectively Tesco wasted their marketing budget developing recognition in a generic term that is freely usable by its competitors.

The Tesco example illustrates what happens all too often when brand creation is separated from brand protection.

Agencies that provide naming services tend not to involve lawyers in the project. They create the name, and leave the final stage, that is the trade mark clearance searches and registration for the client to address themselves with their own lawyers. That approach comes fraught with problems – for one thing it relegates a very minor role to the lawyer, who is the most experienced in trade marks and names.

Also, it means that a trade mark lawyer is never consulted on the name because most businesses don’t have a trade mark lawyer on their team, whereas they will have a general business lawyer they will likely turn to for help. Their general commercial lawyers are not experts in names but can search the trade mark registers. However, their lack of experience in trade marks means they won’t be able to advise on the international dimension and on the suitability of the name for the client’s long term plans. They also won’t always be able to identify names that can’t function as a trade mark.

The upshot is that the client does not receive the best advice on one of the most important assets their business will use and build value around. This can have serious consequences for the business in terms of the revenues it generates and its ability to protect itself against competitors.

Branding agencies really should bring the right expertise on board upfront during the branding process. At the very least they should bear a small portion of the legal fees out of their own budgets if they are offering a naming service even if their client doesn’t want to incur the extra cost of legal fees.

Leaving the legal dimension till the end in the way it’s currently done in the industry means it can be too late for lawyers to impact the choice of name and advise on how to make the name more distinctive for the business. Ultimately the client loses out because if the name or other assets are weak or can’t be readily defended or extended to other countries, the client’s business suffers. It will have a limit on its revenues.

A search and opinion on a name is not a big expense, and could easily be absorbed in the budget of the agency itself, because it’s an intrinsic part of identifying a name to ensure it’s fit for purpose. How can you do that if you don’t have any legal input for the agency itself?

Silo approach

This silo approach in branding whereby brand creation and brand protection are separated doesn’t give founders the best outcome from their branding ventures. To choose brand elements like names that stand out should involve people who understand IP, that is lawyers experienced in copyright and trade marks, who “get” branding and know what the creatives are trying to accomplish.

Clients need to understand the pros and cons of using a particular name before adopting it. At its most basic, if a name is incapable of being owned or would be very difficult to defend, you would be building your business on weak foundations to use it.

I firmly believe that an inter-disciplinary approach to brand creation is essential when a new brand is being designed for small businesses because they will be largely unaware of the significance of IP.

In many ways, IP is all about the inner workings of a business. Discussing the details of IP, can be the equivalent of trying to interest a car driver in how their car engine works. They just want to drive the car they don’t want to learn about the engine.

Agencies providing naming services would be doing their clients a huge favour to find a way to involve lawyers in the branding process. There is a lot more value that the right lawyer can add to the branding project than trade mark availability searches. They can advise on names, and also on how to create other distinctive brand assets for the business to consistently use. For example, colour tends to be emphasised a lot, but it’s not easily protectable. Perhaps the business would do well to develop other assets and focus more on consistently using those on social media and the like, rather than this emphasis they place on colour.

It presents a serious risk to the client if the agency hasn’t at the least had a lawyer conduct searches on the final name the client adopts. It’s like giving someone a dodgy car to drive and telling them to check with their own mechanics that the engine is in good working order.

As clients are unaware of the significance of IP they might well assume the name is good to go, and that the agency is being over cautious in counselling them to consult lawyers. Many of them can and do simply start using the name without consulting a lawyer, so if the agency hasn’t conducted trade mark searches on the name then it really is a defective name they’re potentially giving the client to use.

Company, domain and google checks are simply not enough. There are a host of reasons why a name would not show up in these checks. For example, it might be a product name that’s sold offline. Or someone may have registered the name while they get ready to launch their new business. So, it’s fraught with risk for agencies to offer naming services without doing what’s known as an identical trade mark search on the name themselves before handing it over to their client.

Otherwise they could be laying themselves open to litigation, and it’s not doing the best for the client. By all means further searching and registration can be left to the client, but handing over a name that hasn’t had the most basic trade mark clearance checks is untenable, even if the agency warns the client that they should have their own legal checks to protect the name.

So, I strongly advise agencies to get some identical legal searching in place for names they select for clients and to pay for the checks out of their own budgets. It doesn’t need to be a large expense, but it’s essential to have done these checks before warning the client to run their own checks.

One option is for creatives to learn to do their own trade mark searches, which involves also learning how to find the right trade mark classifications in which to search. I have an online course that teaches all that. It’s an introduction to IP. So, if agencies dealt with their own searches, that could be a way for them to hand over a name more safely to their clients, and they wouldn’t then need to bear the cost of legal searching out of their own budgets unless it was a particularly complex search in which case they could then take advice on an ad hoc basis.

Skillset of Creatives Does not extend to IP

What clients of branding agencies don’t realise is that even if designers or creatives regularly choose names, they are not experienced in IP and trade mark law. It’s not their skillset. IP and trade marks are complex.

Designers and creatives who create intellectual property for their clients don’t know what is involved to protect the brand, while trade mark lawyers don’t get involved in brand creation and wouldn’t know what’s involved to create a brand anyway.

The two worlds are completely separate. There is a huge gulf between them.

The fact that the two disciplines are so far apart is going to be increasingly untenable as we move further into the 21^st century.

I reckon agencies will increasingly see the need to combine both skillsets so that their clients can end up with a stand out brand, using an ownable name and other distinctive assets. The brand name is, after all, a hugely important choice and using the right lawyer on their team means they get a lot more than just trade mark register searching.

The fact that brand creation is a design led activity is a hangover from the 20^th century. When the assets of businesses are largely comprised of IP, they will soon realise that brand creation needs to be an IP led activity.

Combining Both Disciplines

As a business owner and trade mark solicitor dealing with all things brand related, I became keenly interested in marketing and branding a number of years ago.

Even before I began writing my first book Legally Branded in 2011, I was reading a lot of business books on marketing, branding, sales, websites, digital marketing, content marketing, customer service, and more. I’m a real bookaholic, buying more books than I ever have time to read. Sometimes I’ll read a book I bought a few years back and all in all I get through a lot of books. I also attend courses and masterminds to develop my skills, and generally think a lot about branding, and marketing.

The main benefit from all this learning is that I’ve improved my own skills in running my business, and I’m now writing my third book, which is all about branding.

While in the past I used to refer my clients to branding agencies if they needed a name, now, having witnessed the numerous problems businesses have around their names, whether they choose the name themselves or get help from a service provider, I have decided to offer a naming service ourselves.

I can do this because I’ve developed this unusual combination of skills that brings brand creation and brand protection together. Being able to advise small businesses in an inter-disciplinary way is more affordable for the client.

Our Brand Tuned product enables us to provide essential advice on IP upfront. The fact that we are supporting the client to choose the right name, and to protect it before the visual identity work is undertaken means we can do everything in the right order ensuring clients can build their business on solid foundations and don’t miss out on owning valuable IP rights.

We address the visual identity part of branding by either bringing in the client’s own chosen designer or a partner design agency.

I’m also speaking to agencies to see whether a version of the Brand Tuned product might suit them to offer to their clients when they’re quoting for a branding project. Like that those clients who want it, can benefit from IP expertise during the branding process.

I do hope founders and branding agencies alike will listen to the Brand Tuned podcast where I bring together, business, branding and IP.

Sign up to the series of webinars I’m currently running for businesses as they pivot or fine tune their business, and learn more about how to identify a suitable name for your business

Don’t Choose Names Without Involving a Trademark Lawyer Who “gets” Branding

The 7 Costly Mistakes People Make When Turning their Big Idea into a Business, or when Branding or Rebranding Anything

The name is a key part of your brand identity. It’s possibly the most important decision you will ever make. It has the potential to make or break your business. Don’t entrust this work to people who don’t thoroughly understand the legal dimension of names. Or if you do, then be sure to include trademark advice in the mix.

Involving a trademark lawyer who “gets” branding to help you to identify a new name is the ideal. It is the most cost-effective way to get a name that makes your idea sing. Why? Because such a lawyer will understand both the marketing and branding function of a name and the trademark and IP dimension. IP is one of those subjects where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. On the other hand, using a lawyer who doesn’t understand branding might not give you the best business solutions, even though you will get good legal advice.

There is a lot of legalities around names. You need to know which ones are ownable or are already taken. You need to understand which names will be liked by the ideal client so that they can be effective from a marketing perspective.

People often get help from a designer to choose a name even though there is nothing about names that requires graphic design input. While some designers may have expertise in naming, the vast majority do not. They may do one or two naming exercises a year, if that. So, they don’t know as much about names as they need to know. Some I’ve come across tend to choose unsuitable names from a legal perspective. Many of them assume that the right to use a name comes from domain or company registration. That’s all the checks they’ll do, and sometimes they don’t even do google and domain name checks. Most don’t check the trademark registers and leave you to get the name checked out by your own lawyers,

Make sure you consult a trademark specialist if that’s the case. Your general business lawyer won’t be as well placed to assess whether the name is one you can stop others using and how difficult it would be to enforce your rights in that name.

It’s possible to register any name with a logo but what value does that give you if you can’t then stop competitors stealing your market share when they use the same name with a different logo?

If you don’t consult someone experienced in names, then you risk ending up with a trademark which effectively just protects the logo rather than the name on its own.

To identify a name that reflects your positioning, that is protectable as a word mark and that you can stop others from using in ways that confuse the market is something that requires a good understanding of trademarks and branding.

Inventors and entrepreneurs often believe that simple tasks like choosing a name for a new product do not involve legal consideration. This is not true.

For one thing, you could lose everything overnight, as Scrabulous did. The two Indian brothers that developed an app enabling people to play a word game online with friends anywhere in the world were unaware that using a name that was like someone else’s trademark would be a problem. Their app was a huge success, until Hasbro, the owner of the Scrabble trademark, found out about the company. Hasbro had no trouble getting Facebook to pull the app. So Scrabulous vanished from one day to the next despite having hundreds of thousands of users.

Had the two brothers realised that their choice of name could shut them down they would have chosen a different name for their online game. But they didn’t take advice from trademark experts to investigate the trademark implications of their choice of name. It’s just not worth the risk.

Although Scrabulous rebranded and got back on its feet, the IP problems were a huge set-back for them. Zynga was able to take advantage and enter the market with Words with Friends. It is now the market leader.

Even where you have limited resources, you should think carefully before foregoing help from a professional to carry out a search of the trademark registers.

Think of your brand name as if it were a physical plot of land, and your branding and business as buildings you would build on that plot. What you don’t want is to find that you’ve built on property that you don’t own. Ownership of your brand name is key before you build your brand.

Trade Mark Use – When May You Legitimately Use Someone Else’s Trade Mark?

To discuss trade mark use let’s start by taking a couple of steps back to understand a bit more about trade marks.

Trade marks are the way to protect your ‘brand”. This word is overused to mean almost whatever a writer wants it to mean, but for current purposes suffice to say “brand” originates from the days when animals were burned with a branding iron to indicate ownership of them.

So to indicate our ownership of our business, or products and services we use various types of “sign”, the most universal one being a name.

The law protects certain names through intellectual property rights known as trademarks.

Names

One major advantage a business has over an individual is in getting to choose its own name. However, the subject of names is surprisingly complex, and poorly understood, even within the branding industry. The upshot is that many businesses do not give the choice sufficient time, and consideration and get into difficulties later on. They might then have to rebrand to either adjust the name or change it altogether.

Some of the complexity arises because there are various places where people may register names. It’s possible to register domain names, company names, or to simply adopt a trading name and use it without taking any further action.

Trade marks are more remote to small businesses due to the higher official fees payable to register them. This makes them less accessible than domain and company names. Trade marks also have complexities that make them less suitable to just go register without taking advice.

The upshot is that fewer people tend to register trade marks than register company or domain names.

In this post, I’m not going to cover what types of name are capable of being owned because that’s a large subject. Instead, I want to focus on trade mark use because people are often confused as to what they may or may not do if a name is trade marked.

For example, can they register a similar name? Is it acceptable to refer to a business by its name on your blog? When may you use a hashtag of a brand name? What if someone registers the ‘domain.sucks’ a version of your brand name? What actions might you take?

Such questions all turn on what amounts to trade mark use. There are more questions than space allows for me to answer them but if you’re wondering about use of others’ trade marks in Google Ads then a good starting point for your research are some posts I’ve written such as Should Google be prevented from profiting from cybersquatting?, Louis Vuitton v Google – The AG’s Opinion and Adwords Trademark Policy – Using Competitors’ Names In Adwords

Function of a Trade Mark

A trade mark acts as a ‘container” in which the brand value generated in the business is captured. Although it is possible to have trade mark rights without registering a trade mark, unregistered rights are very weak. Unless you have a significant budget to enforce your unregistered rights you effectively don’t have any rights in a name you’re using if you haven’t registered it as a trade mark. It’s less expensive to enforce your rights in a name you have registered.

A trade mark ring fences an area of business in which you have exclusive rights to use your brand name. Competitors can be stopped from using any name that is similar in sound, concept, or visually as they may effectively then be “free riding” on your brand.

This is a big trap for the unwary who think they can just make a slight change of spelling in order to use a similar name. Trade marks give wide protection against confusingly similar names which is why it makes sense to ensure you have a name you can own, that is not descriptive, and that nobody else already owns.

A trade mark is the closest you get to having exclusive rights to use the name for your goods and services. If the name of your business is not capable of being protected through a trade mark registration then it will be very expensive, if not impossible to protect your business name and build up goodwill under that name.

The use of a trade mark in connection with goods and/or services in a manner that is likely to cause confusion, deception, or mistake about the source of the goods and/or services is what the law prevents other people doing.

So how might third parties legitimately use your trade mark?

As I mentioned in How To Blog Safely And Avoid Infringement of Intellectual Property the mere reference in your blog to a word trade mark – such as “BARCLAYS BANK” or “GAP” will not amount to trade mark infringement because names are not protected by copyright law, and trade mark infringement is based on consumer confusion. So, a mere reference to someone’s brand name in your blog is not going to lead to such confusion. The only exception to this is if your use is such that the relevant consumer might be led to believe that your blog is somehow connected to or supported by Barclays Bank.

And as mentioned in this blog about the use of #Hashtags and trade mark infringement, “If a hashtag name constitutes or includes a registered trademark, at first glance it may be sufficient (without registration of a hashtag itself) to bring an infringement claim and establish consumer confusion of a competing use.”… however, the courts tend to attribute a degree of consumer sophistication to internet users which makes it less rather than more likely that mere use of a hashtag would amount to trade mark infringement. (See Public Impact v Boston Consulting )

And as for using a trade mark name within a domain name such as .sucks as I mentioned in my blog Buying the Suckscom Version of Your Brand where there is simply non-commercial use, then ‘gripe sites’ or protest sites as they are often called, are unlikely to be making trade mark use of a brand. Therefore, there would be no risk of customer confusion. In such situations, it is possible to argue there is a ‘legitimate interest’ in using the brand name.

Conclusion

The law aims to keep trade marks free for others to use. Therefore, if you own a mark and do not genuinely make commercial use of it in the country in which your mark is registered for a five year period you will not be able to enforce your rights in that trade mark.

It is not sufficient to just say that the mark has been used, or to just produce a catalogue or a price list showing your mark. There needs to be a clear chain of documentation showing use of the mark in relation to the goods / services for which the mark is registered. So, you might be able to prove use for some goods and services in which you’ve registered your mark but not all of them in which case you will lose your rights over part of your mark.

As they say in trade mark law, Use it or Lose it

Are You Looking to Brand or Rebrand Your Business?

If you’re considering a rebrand or are setting up a new venture start by taking this post on board as it could help you avoid many mistakes people commonly make.

That’s because society hasn’t yet caught up with the huge changes the internet has caused. The way you go about rebranding needs rethinking, yet most people don’t realise this.

I remember hearing about the internet for the first time in the mid-90s during my intellectual property masters’ degree studies. My mind was completely blown away by Professor Chris Reed’s IT law lectures at QMW, London University. Back then the internet was still very much about Janet an academic network. Professor Reed’s lectures were so inspiring in terms of the significant role the internet would play in our lives, that I was compelled to enlist my husband’s support- he is an IT professional – to get us a dial-up internet connection.

Over the ensuing years the internet has evolved to become what it is today – an essential part of all our lives and businesses.

What This Means for Business

It is still hard to believe that in such a short space of time the internet has evolved to radically change the rules. Its thrown many industries into chaos, and in other cases, the internet has subtly, and forever altered how we need to approach things, including branding.

The upshot of these changes, as highlighted in my two books, Legally Branded and Intellectual Property Revolution mean that IP now needs to be one of the first considerations when there is a new project or brand to create.

IP is Part and Parcel of Business

So many people I come across say: “What is IP?” And those who are aware of it, assume it’s to be dealt with in the same way as in pre-internet days. Largely, IP is considered to be something you might want to consider if you’re wildly successful or if you prefer to protect your IP rather than just using it. It’s perhaps unsurprising that society hasn’t yet caught up with the changes, given that it’s still just 20 years or so that the internet has been around.

More than 70 % of corporate value today comprises intangible assets. Intangibles are governed by intellectual property law. Without question intellectual property in the form of patents, trade secrets, copyright, trade marks, contractual relationships, and know-how comprises a significant portion of some of this value.

What is less well appreciated is that these assets do not automatically just exist. Some steps often need to be taken to turn ideas into IP. IP could be lost if not identified, captured, and secured, or if the wrong choices are made – such as of the name for a business or product. The wrong name really can make business so much more of a struggle. The name is the most important way to make a business distinctive and must be chosen with the involvement of trade mark experts.

Leveraging IP is how value embedded in it is realized. An awareness of intangible assets is the way to manage them, and preserve the investment a business makes in its brands

How Aware Are You of Critical IP Issues Affecting Your Business?

Thinking about IP first when you have an idea or project, is a good way to start managing and protecting IP. Have a strategy for handling your IP.

Why is failing to capture your Intellectual Property a costly problem?

It is surprisingly easy to overlook the importance of IP at the early stages of developing your ideas, and to lose the entire value of your business in the process, simply because of a lack of awareness of IP.

Inventors and entrepreneurs often believe that simple tasks like choosing a name for a new product do not involve particular legal consideration. This is not true. The name is too important to choose without reference to trade mark expertise.

For example, you could lose everything overnight as Scrabulous found out. The business was unaware that using a name that was similar to someone else’s trade mark would be a problem. Two Indian brothers developed an app that allowed people to play a word game online with friends anywhere in the world. It was a huge success. Hasbro, the owner of the Scrabble trade mark, found out about the company and had no trouble getting Facebook to pull the app. So the business vanished from one day to the next.

Had the two brothers realised that their choice of name could shut them down they would have chosen a different name for their online game. But they didn’t take advice from trade mark experts.

Not Realising You’re Making IP Mistakes

But this isn’t the only way names can cause problems. People are often unaware that it’s their keyword rich name that blatantly describes their business services that’s the cause of their lack of success. This is something difficult to understand because from a search engine and marketing point of view descriptiveness is no bad thing. But to name your brand with a descriptive term is plain wrong. This is one of the biggest mistakes I see people make and what’s worse they may never realise that the reason business is a struggle is precisely because of their name.

Another example of how failure to understand IP can result in loss is the Karaoke machine.

Mr. Daisuke Inoue, the inventor, earned nothing from the billion-dollar industry that the invention spawned. He never thought of patenting his invention until it was too late. Had he done so it could have made him millions.

Reflecting on their experiences, one can’t help feeling ‘it’s not fair!’ that it was the multinationals and not them who made massive financial gains from these inventions. However, their case is not unusual and even now many inventors know little about their intellectual property rights.

The lesson is simple – if you are an inventor, or entrepreneur you need to know about IP.

Business and IP are intertwined. Don’t think of embarking on branding without first looking at IP. Use a trade mark lawyer who “gets” branding to support you in any naming exercise. Why? Because IP and trademarks are one of those subjects where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

What Does It Mean When You Trademark A Name?

Your brand name should be a “barrier to entry” – protecting you against the threats that competitors potentially present. Just as patenting an invention gives you a monopoly right over your invention and acts as a barrier to entry against competitors, so names are also important barriers to entry provided they are well chosen. Not any name will cut it. It’s important to take advice on your business or brand name before adopting it.

Your Brand Name Is Like A Physical Plot of Land

Intellectual property rights such as trademarks give you property rights similar to the ownership of physical property. Just as you wouldn’t develop land without first making sure you owned it, so you need to own a name if you’re going to build your brand around it.

There is a similar system in place to that of the land registry, so that you can check ownership rights in a name and register it as a trademark. Although trademarks differ from physical property. They involve complexities. For example, using a similar name is a problem as Scrabulous discovered when it received a cease and desist letter from Scrabble and lost its market leading online word game overnight.

The other day someone said to me, but Shireen we should deal with so many things that we don’t – for example, we should have a shareholder agreement, or we should have a will, we should have employment contracts. He was implying that IP was no different. However, IP like trademarks are completely different. It’s completely wrong to lump trademarking with other legal actions you might put off till it’s convenient. Nor is IP an “insurance” thing either.

IP underpins your very business, and disregarding it is to gamble with your entire business. Would you put off getting title to a piece of land that you were developing by building properties on it? Would you just rely on squatting rights while you developed it? I doubt it. Your brand is no less important.

Don’t Just Use a Name Without Registering it

It’s vital to register a trademark as soon as possible to protect your legal identity before you move on to creating your visual identity.

If there’s a name I myself want to use I won’t even reveal it publicly till I’ve filed an application to register it as a trade mark. I know what can go wrong. So, if you’re testing an idea and are not ready to spend money on trademarking, I recommend using a temporary name rather than a name you love and which you’ve not protected.

With one of my trademarks, I discovered that a bigger business was using the same name and had even registered it as an EU trade mark. I challenged them on this. And because I had right on my side, I prevailed. In that case, I agreed to sell them my trademark for a 5-figure sum because they really needed to use the name. I wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on if I had simply used the name first without registering it as a trademark. In practice, my only option would have been to rebrand given that they’d registered an EU trade mark. I’d have had no financial support for the costs involved in the rebranding. But when you have legal title to a name you have a strong bargaining position.

Registering Trademarks in The Brexit Era

With Brexit having been in the air these past few years and potentially likely to happen in 2020, it makes more sense for people to apply to register a UK trademark than an EU one.

A UK trademark is a solid foundation for extending your trademark protection to other countries worldwide using the Madrid Protocol system. You could specify the EU in such an application and secure protection in the 27 countries.

Since the UK voted to leave the European Union, it’s become more common for brand owners to use the Madrid Protocol system rather than European Union trademarks. These used to be very popular given that a single application enabled you to protect your mark across the EU’s 28 member states (which includes the UK). But Brexit makes an EU trademark less appealing.

The Madrid Protocol system is the way we extend our clients’ UK trademarks to secure protection for their brand in the EU market, as well as the USA – which is one of the other popular jurisdictions.

If you need help to protect your brand then we are well placed to support you.

Building a Business on Solid IP Foundation Using Process

IP is quite straightforward when you understand the fundamentals. Get them right in your business and you can build the business on solid foundations long term.

I suggest you start by reviewing what intellectual property means because it really helps to see the big picture. When you’re not familiar with intellectual property terminology, you don’t know whether it’s patents or copyright, or trade mark that is relevant to your situation. This makes it difficult to know where to start and what to read. So a basic grasp of IP so you can identify the different intellectual property rights is essential for successfully navigating the digital environment nowadays.

Digitalisation is fast changing the world, and with it the skills we need in order to manage our businesses. The changes brought about by the internet have made IP central to every business because most assets of businesses nowadays are intangible and the legal area that deals with intangibles is intellectual property. Every entrepreneur would do well to learn the basic language of IP.

The meaning of IP terms is fairly universal the world over due to the many international treaties that have been signed between countries to enforce and protect intellectual property.

Most significant intellectual property issues occur in the early stages of projects, before anyone would even think of consulting a lawyer. And most serious IP mistakes happen because the IP angle wasn’t addressed first when embarking on projects. The IP strategy I’m advocating is to think about IP first, rather than assuming it can be protected later.

It’s clearly impractical to consult lawyers every time you have a new initiative or project. For one thing, people often want to test the water, wait and see if the project has legs before asking a lawyer for help to protect the concept.

However, as “protection” needs to happen in the early stages of projects – for example, by making correct choices, doing the right due diligence research, and taking the right actions, an understanding of the longer-term implications of your early actions when implementing new ideas is essential.

This is where procedures come into their own, as a way to protect IP.

The key to protecting IP assets invariably involves taking steps at the start of projects when new IP is about to be created. The ideal is to have a process so you don’t need to specifically think about how to protect IP.

Using processes in your business is how you can make sure you take the right actions early on in order to be protected when implementing your ideas. There is no need to consult lawyers. Seeking legal advice is often not the most practical way of dealing with IP in the early stages of projects. You can instead ensure you don’t lose valuable rights, even where the idea is patentable, simply by using the right processes.

By adopting some or all of the processes that are provided in Legally Branded, anyone can protect their IP on an ongoing basis. Just make sure your team understands the events that trigger a process. They will then be able to ensure your IP is protected even though they may not know anything about IP.

The procedures could be spelt out in an office manual or on your wiki or intranet. Then when inducting new team members train them to identify the trigger points for use of your processes.

Learn more about the Legally Branded Academy 2.0.

Brand Strategy Is Essential For Success In Business

I recently wrote an extensive piece Brand Strategy Why Every Business Needs One on my personal blog.

Brand strategy is one of the most important issues to deal with if you want to create a business that grows in brand value and delivers more leads and opportunities.

We’re developing a methodology to support our clients to create their brand strategy and it’s important to take a fresh look at what you think “brand” means when considering this piece and the videos here.

Brand, branding, intellectual property, trade mark, business design – these are all very much misunderstood as terms, or people don’t even know what they mean. Yet these are really important issues for a business to take on board whether it’s starting up, scaling or looking to exit.

In the blog post and first video, I explain what is involved in working out your brand strategy.

Don’t assume bigger businesses all have brand strategies because many of them don’t have one – particularly tech companies as they focus all their attention on the product.

Uber is an example of what happens when you don’t have a brand strategy. While the business is a success and has even reached unicorn status, its lack of attention to brand has caused numerous problems. In the second video, I go into Uber’s case in more depth.

If you want support to craft your brand strategy so as to build brand value, and attract more leads and opportunities then do get in touch. We can help you whether you’re a start up, scale up or a business looking to plan your exit.

Intellectual Property Rights – Frightening?

I was speaking to a designer recently who said that people find IP rights very frightening.

That intrigued me. Why fear IP? Is it that you fear what you don’t understand? Is it that IP is a nuisance perhaps?

Whatever the reasons for this designer’s comment the reality is that IP is part and parcel of business. You need to be mindful of IP all the time, whether you’re starting a new project or business or growing or exiting a business.

It’s Possible It’s Not Your Intellectual Property

The fact that it’s possible that something you assume is yours is regarded by the legal system as not yours is a difficult concept to grasp perhaps. That’s because IP often resides within something else. At it’s simplest you may own a book but you don’t own the copyright in that book. It belongs to the author or the publisher. Similarly, you may own your website in the sense that it’s your site, but not necessarily own the copyright in its designs and functionality. What this means is that you can use it for your business but if you try to licence valuable parts of the design or functionality to others in order to generate a new income stream you would be prevented from doing so because you don’t own the copyright and designs in it.

Questions that arise in relation to IP include:

What type of IP is it?
How should you protect it so it can be yours?
What should you do to turn your idea into IP that you can own?
Is it essential to keep your idea secret so you can own valuable IP?
Are you infringing on other people’s Intellectual Property?

What Is Intellectual Property?

Intellectual property (“IP”) is an umbrella term that describes a range of rights in intangible assets, such as:

- - - Copyright: in various works like photographs, words, music, logos, and software.
    - Designs: rights in the shape of goods like ipads, or bottles, or in the surface design of materials such as wallpaper.
    - Trademarks: rights in packaging, names, slogans, and logos.
    - Patents: over an innovation which was previously unknown, like the bagless Dyson vacuum cleaner.

IP rights are territorial, which means you are generally protected in the countries in which you register them. For IP rights that arise automatically, such as copyright, you will have wider protection worldwide thanks to international treaties between countries.

Also, there are useful measures you can and should take in other countries to better protect your assets.

Owning Intellectual Property

To own intellectual property rights it’s necessary to take the right actions in relation to your ideas. That’s how you avoid discovering that your ideas become someone else’s intellectual property. It’s important when commissioning someone to carry out certain types of activity that results in new IP to have the right agreements in place.

Otherwise, you could find that:

your logo belongs to the designer who created it.
your website is not yours to do with as you like

Due to the IP default rules, it’s all too possible if you don’t know the right actions to take, to find that you pay for work to be created, but that you don’t own the rights to exploit it.

The biggest trap to avoid is finding that your idea for business software becomes the IP of those who develop it.

Avoid Infringement

It’s necessary to think of IP in two ways. Firstly, whether you will be infringing on someone else’s intellectual property rights. Secondly, whether someone else is infringing on your rights.

Doing searches of various kinds and registering rights is key to protecting inventions and names. As it’s necessary to protect your turf against copycats, disputes can arise all too easily, so you need help to manage and resolve them, even if that doesn’t involve a last resort of using the court process.

Typically, not owning copyright to something important in your business is undesirable. This could result in the sale of your business falling through.

To protect IP involves implementing a range of legal agreements, not just when you’re setting up a new website, or licensing your IP or selling products and services online, but also as you grow the business. It becomes even more important with growth of a business to have good agreements in place that protect your intellectual property.

Protecting a new name, software and other assets against copying of all kinds, or an invention that could be patentable are reasons to deal with IP. It’s what makes your business valuable.

So going back to the question I started with, whether IP is frightening, it’s not IP that is the problem so much as ignorance of something important in business.

We are still at the early stages of the digital economy, but the more digital our lives become the more essential it is to get a good understanding of IP and protect your business. Start by having an intellectual property assessment and advice. We provide this at Azrights.

Brand Name Dispute

Brand name disputes occur all too frequently because the trademark registers are increasingly cluttered and it can be difficult to find available names. You may be found using a name for one purpose, but as soon as you use it for another purpose you could actually be facing a brand name dispute.

When you use a name or other brand symbol that someone else claims to have a better title to, or if you find someone using confusingly similar branding to yours and want to challenge it, you have a dispute to deal with.

As it is not widely appreciated that it is necessary to check the trademark registers before using a name, brand name disputes are one of the most common ones we see. For example:

A client secures their desired domain name, sometimes spending thousands of pounds, only to receive notice that its use infringes on someone else’s trademark rights. The rights to use of a name stem from trademarks not from domain or company name availability.
If a domain name is registered that is deemed to be a registration in bad faith, then you could be challenged to return the domain to its rightful owners. For example, even if you have managed to buy a domain name for the name cocacolaclothing.co.uk for your online clothing business it does not mean you are entitled to use that name to sell your line of clothing.
A logo is registered as a UK trademark, but an EU trademark owner believes it infringes on their word trademark and sends a cease and desist letter requiring the withdrawal of all products bearing that logo.

Sometimes someone may simply be using their own name in the business, but this may conflict with a registered trademark. For example, if your name is Paul Smith and you are a fashion designer, you would have a potential dispute to deal with if you decided to set up shop as Paul Smith, given that the trademark rights of the famous designer Paul Smith in fashion and clothing would block you.

Resolving the dispute

Brand name disputes usually take one of three forms:

Either the dispute is in relation to registered trademarks – these may involve opposition to a trademark application or a cease and desist letter threatening court proceedings.
Brand name disputes can also occur if someone is using a name but hasn’t registered it as a trademark. In that case, they would argue ‘passing off’ and possibly threaten court proceedings. Or if you have applied to register a trademark they may either oppose your trademark application based on their earlier rights or apply to cancel your registration if you have already registered the mark.
Domain name disputes – now whether or not the brand name is a registered trademark, and no matter how strong or weak your position may be, the starting point for addressing any brand name dispute is to get specialist advice so as to decide how best to respond.

You may need to change your name and will need to use someone who both understands brands and names. It is so important to use a trademark expert who ‘gets’ branding rather than simply asking a brand agency to help you. Leaving the legal dimension till after the choice has been made could expose you to a further dispute, or leave you with a name that can’t uniquely belong to you.