Just imagine: you invest all your marketing expertise, a big part of your time and your knowledge, your client invests an important for him budget in a marketing campaign and … your client is notified by a legal letter that he has no right to use this trademark as it is registered by somebody else and your clients should immediately seize any use of his trademark, take all his products from the market, change the name of the shop/restaurant, etc…
From our experience it is a very common story and you should be lucky if until now you and your trademark didn’t have any legal involvement.
Most of your clients do not know even what means to register a trademark, how to do it, and they expect that you hold them by hand through everything means trademark, even if this is really not your job!
Even experienced managers sometimes do not realize the importance of trademark registration until they are involved in a trademark litigation story.
So, even if the necessity of trademark registration is the basic knowledge of most of marketing advisers, SEO programmers, marketing directors and managers – don’t presume that your client’s trademarks are registered!
In a lot of cases they are not, or they are registered for other classes of products and/or services or even they are registered they don’t offer a high degree of protection of your client’s business.
And the better you will prepare your marketing campaign, the higher will be your client’s trademarks visibility – the bigger will be the chance to be noticed by other similar trademark’s owners, that will be – with good or bad will – willing to stop your marketing campaign and have some benefits out of it.
It is difficult to believe it but, from our experience, you would be amazed to know that even big marketing companies that have their advertisement in the most public places sometimes have their brands not protected and some of the biggest advertisement campaigns, started on a national level were compromised by lack of check of previously registered trademarks and had to be stopped or had to pay important amounts to have the right of use of a trademark by licensing or acquiring it.
So, even if it sound like a boring ABC of any marketing campaign – check your client’s trademark – is it registered ? was it registered correctly for the right products/services ? This is the cornerstone in developing any branding strategy.
Due to the fact that in most of the countries the registration procedure lasts around 8-10 months, a marketing campaign or launching a product has to be planed long time before it is actually done.
With respect to trademark registration, the most important point is the preliminary search.
And it is not enough to request to the national office a preliminary search or to do it yourself in public databases.
Any experienced patent attorney will tell you that it is impossible to guarantee by preliminary search 100% security for a trademark against any kind of future legal infringements.
In our future postings we will explain the problems to avoid in preliminary searches – problems that most of your patent attorneys will not point to you but you should know.
