What You Don’t Know About Trademarks Could Hurt Your Business

Keeping your intellectual property and trademarks, brands safely your own is critical to your ongoing sales success. To your customers. The design of your logo, your business name, and your trademark slogans identify you and are your company’s lifeblood. So not knowing about how to protect them with trademarks, or patents and copyrights applicable is not only foolhardy but downright dangerous to your entrepreneurial venture.

Entrepreneurs Intellectual Property Horror Stories

Read these tales of caution from other entrepreneurs about why trademark protection is so important:

A client of mine had their web designer purchase and register their domain name, which matched their company name and brand name. However, the business owner did not realize that domain names MUST be registered under the company’s name, not a third-party vendor. After a year when the domain needed to be renewed the web designer could not be found, and thus the domain was not renewed, and the business’s website went down. After weeks of frantic phone calls, faxes and please the domain registration company reissue the domain in the companies control. “I had no idea that I did not own the name, even though I paid the web designer for its purchase,” said this entrepreneur.

Take away – ALWAYS register your domain in your account for any business website. We recommend using Go Daddy for affordable and professional website name registration.

 

Another business associate of mine claims that they had their brand name “stolen” by the large multinational corporation Unilever. This was possible because the firm did not register that slogan and brand name the US trademark and patent office – which is a relatively quick and inexpensive process, and would have immediately protected this small business from large corporations.

 

Take away – TAKE TIME and a small amount of money to do a trademark search and trademark registration of your important brand names and slogans to avoid being swallowed up by a bigger fish in your marketplace. Save 10% on all legal services from Legalzoom.com with our exclusive discount referral code BEST4B

Brilliant inventors are particularly susceptible to having their marketable products stolen, often by offshore companies, and counterfeited online. It happened to the inventor of Swiggies, a wrist-worn water bottle, by Chinese taste websites, who had the audacity use a stolen photograph of the creator to sell their counterfeit products. However, because this company had trademark protection, they were able to rid themselves of these bad companies.

 

Take away – MONITOR the internet and your marketplace for possible infringements of your trademarks and act swiftly with professional legal services to protect your intellectual property. You’ve worked hard to build a name for your business. Now protect it.

Small Business Blog by Marsha Kelly, Entrepreneur & Small Business Reporter

Hi - I am a serial entrepreneur, after doing "time" in corporate America, who has learned about what products and services work well for entrepreneurs who want to start a business. You can learn from my experience and my associates as we shop from the internet for tools, supplies and information to build our businesses and improve the lives of our family and ourselves. Read more ...