As a marketer, I know just how important it is to choose the right name for a company or product. It needs to be easy to spell and pronounce (in various languages if you’re going international). If possible, it should have some positive connotations (definitely no negative ones) that can be associated to your company or product. And above all, it must be distinctive and unique.
The question is how do you work out what is unique, beyond a URL search, and then how to protect it? The answer is trademarks. I know what you are going to say…
Do I really need to worry about trademarks?
Yes, for two reasons.
- You might be a small business already trading under a name that already exists in the market. And maybe the other company that has trademarked that name in your industry classification won’t ever issue you with a cease and desist letter when you enter their market, because they are nice people and just don’t feel there’s any harm in letting a company by the same name trade in their market. Or maybe they do. It’s a decision that is totally out of your control. Do you really want to take that chance as you build a global brand?
- You’ve invested tonnes of money into building your brand in your market and then all of a sudden another company enters the market with the same name. Trademarking your name protects your brand from being copied or from another company riding the wave of your brand awareness you’ve invested so much into building.
Trademarks are important if you want to build a brand on a solid foundation and protect it in the long-term.
How hard is it to successfully trademark a name?
According to the US Patent & Trademark Office, there have been182,000 trademark registrations and 312 000 applicationsin the past 5 months alone. That’smore words than there are entries for in the Oxford Dictionary!
You can imagine how hard it is, and how much harder it gets with each passing month, to dream up a name for your product or company that is unique and distinctive enough that it can be successfully trademarked and protected in large markets like the US or Europe – especially in the technology industry. But there are a couple of routes you can try when developing a new name if you find your chosen one is already trademarked.
How to come up with a unique company name
When coming up with a company or product name, you can either go with:
- an acronym (IBM, SAP),
- a family or person’s name (Ford, Dell)
- an existing word (Amazon, Apple, Salesforce)
- a misspelled word that looks or sounds like an existing word (Xero, Google), or
- a completely new word either made up of a combination of existing words (PayPal, Instagram, Accenture), or
- a completely new word entirely made up (Skype).
How to make sure it’s available
Try Google first. If you don’t get any companies coming up that are using that word as a name in your industry, you’re off to a good start. Keep in mind that even if another company does come in the results, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve trademarked it.
Check the national trademark search database for the country or countries you want to trade in and search for your name within your industry classification:
- US Patent and Trademark Office search system
- Canadian Trademarks database
- European Union Intellectual Property Office search system
- United Kingdom trademark search
- Australian Government IP Search
- New Zealand IP Office Search
- South African Companies and IP Commission search
If you don’ t come across any trademark registrations for that same word in our classifications, then contact a trademark attorney to conduct a more thorough search using their local experts in those markets and advise you further. You don’t need to work through an attorney as you can register a trademark yourself, but working with one can save you a lot of time and increase your chances of getting your registration through the first time.
In conclusion, some advice
My advice to any company already operating and with ambitions to grow globally is make sure your brand name is trademarked and protected.
If it is not, you should
- conduct your own search in any of the national IP or trademark offices’ databases (some of which are listed above, others can be found through a simple Google search);
- hire a credible trademark attorney to either register your name or advise and guide you along the process of registering a new name.
If you MUST change your businesses name, then
- hire a brand development agency for the creative process of developing the right name for you. (We didn’t do this but only because we had no idea how time consuming and difficult it would be. Although it worked out well in the end and we love our new name, it did take up a lot of time and perhaps more importantly “headspace.” I could have been focusing on other pressing things requiring that required this level of strategic thinking or creativity;
- hire a change management agency or consultant to help with the communication and roll-out process of the new name to all stakeholders: staff, partners, customers, and the market. We managed well on our own, but if you don’t have the internal competency for this, or the time, rather outsource this very important and often neglected step;
- and finally, just pray to whatever god(s) you believe in that whatever name you finally come with gets the green light from stakeholders and your trademark attorney. (Yes. Seriously.)
