What Should I Know About Trademarking Slogans and Taglines?
THINKING OF TRADEMARKING YOUR BRAND?
Different industries focus on trademarking different things. Depending on what you do, you may choose to file for a service name trademark, a product name trademark, or a logo trademark. Many service industries are extremely competitive. They are often highly populated with key players, like long-time real estate agents or mortgage brokers.
They all tend to act under a larger brand that they do not control or own. However, the competition must take rise somewhere: there are teams and individuals who come up with unique ways to compete with other players in their market. If it were real estate, agents would want to encourage local buyers to choose them over the competition, even if the competition was their coworker.
As a result, different teams of people within service industries often come up with a catchy phrase that conveniently explains who they are to their market. Importantly, it helps the market remember exactly how they are different from all the other competitors. These taglines are actually extremely valuable if they are memorable.
Once people relate them to your brand, they are powerful, especially if they compel the potential market to buy from you. That's exactly the kind of thing that you want to protect, otherwise, you give your competition free rein to use it for their own purposes.
So how do you trademark them? Same as everything else! You check to see if they are available and ensure that they can be trademarked. If nobody has taken that phrase or something too similar to it, you can file a trademark application. The application will have the tagline as the trademark itself, and you'll list the products and services that the tagline should cover. Are you ready to protect your slogan? Get to it!
