If you are in business and have a product or service, you need to have a brand name or a trademark. You should ensure that your product or service has legal protection by getting a trademark. A trademark will give your business its own identity and will consolidate its market position thus giving you a commercial advantage.
Trademark registration offers you a valuable and fast approach to the security of your business identity. Some business people are still unaware of the need for a trademark as a way of ensuring their intellectual property rights are secured.
Here are important reasons why you should have your trademark registered.
The Importance of Exclusivity
With a trademark registration, you become the legal owner of the brand name of the product or service that you are offering. The brand name becomes your exclusively and nobody else can use it to provide a product or service of similar nature. Once you have the trademark, you are the only business legally allowed to use the brand name in your industry. Should other people make attempts at using the brand name, you are free to challenge them legally because you protected by the law because you have registered rights to the brand.
Avoiding Legal Challenges
When you have a brand and it is unregistered, you might be subjected to legal challenges even if the origin of the brand is yours. Once your name is legally your own and does not belong to anyone else, you cannot be challenged for it through a legal process. Even if you are challenged, you can prove in court that you have exclusive rights to the brand name. This is because, before registration, you undertake a search to determine if the name belongs to someone else. Once you have the trademark registration, you can be sure that you have not infringed on other people’s legal rights. An important thing to note here is that even after you register your trademark you can face trademark cancellation. If someone can show that they are being directly harmed by your registered trademark.
Safeguarding the Goodwill of Your Business
When you have been in business for a long time and have worked to build a reputation, your business gains a name for itself. It means that you have what is known as goodwill. This also means that your brand becomes strong and recognizable in your market segment. Without the required trademark registration, this goodwill and reputation might end up in nothing.
Making your business dependable and consistent is of no point if you do not have a registered brand identity. You get a trademark so that people will know the difference between you and the competition. Once you have a distinctive trademark and keep providing customers with quality service or products, your business will become identified with its brand name.
If that brand name is registered, your business will continue to grow its reputation. Consumers will know where the origin of the products and services you offer come from with a strong brand that can be remembered easily, you will continue to increase the value of your share market.
Other reasons why you need to get trademark registration include helping your customers identify genuine products and services from you. You also need to have registration in order to avoid getting locked out of the market by the competition. If someone registers your brand before you, they might claim that your products or services belong to them. There are actually so many reasons why you must register your trademark although the above reasons are of greater importance.
