1. Brand protection stands for trust in your company
Registering your brand ensures that no one can use it for business purposes without your permission. You can also take legal action against the use of similar signs that may want to benefit from your brand’s reputation. This protects your customers from receiving the wrong product or service and safeguards your brand from misuse.
By protecting your brand, customers can be sure that the goods or services offered actually come from your company. With the quality and service they are used to from you.
Once registered, a brand is protected for ten years. After that, the brand protection can be renewed for another ten years at any time.
2. Brand searches are essential
Conversely, it is also highly advisable to research before registering a brand, but also before using a brand mark, to ensure that your planned brand does not infringe existing older trademark rights.
Because once you have introduced a brand, you may receive a cease and desist letter because you are infringing existing third-party rights. You would then have to not only stop using the brand immediately, but possibly also disclose supply chains, recall or destroy products, and provide information about profits generated. Not to mention the associated damage to your image. Should you have to change your company name, you start from scratch again. This is what you want to avoid.
Therefore, you should definitely conduct thorough research before registering or using a brand to ensure you are not infringing any third-party rights.
3. What is a brand anyway?
A brand serves to distinguish a company’s products or services from those of its competitors. For example, many companies manufacture cars, but there is only one manufacturer in Ingolstadt that is called Audi.
The brand thus represents a unique and distinctive term or slogan that stands exclusively for your company and must not be used by others.
In contrast, purely descriptive information such as “success coach” or “tutoring trainer” or “smart TV” are not brands in the trademark sense. They are not terms that can be protected through a trademark. Everyone should be able to use such descriptive terms. They merely describe the goods or services offered and must be kept free for use.
This criterion applies in relation to the protected goods or services. A fruit merchant cannot protect the term “apple” or “Apple” as a trademark. A computer manufacturer can protect the term, however, because it is not descriptive but distinctive for computers.
4. Brand types
The most common type of brand is the word mark. This is a term used as a brand and written as it would be written on a typewriter. From a legal perspective, the word mark is the strongest and most flexible type of brand, especially when the main criterion of distinctiveness is met. For this reason, we regularly recommend it.
There is also the so-called word-and-figurative mark, where a logo can be protected as a brand. If you want to protect a purely graphic logo, on the other hand, it is referred to as a figurative mark.
5. Brand protection with funding up to €1,000
Solid brand protection is therefore important for founders and startups for sustainable economic success. Sound advice with research avoids costly brand conflicts and puts your project on a solid foundation. At the same time, platforms like Amazon promise additional benefits for merchants with the “Amazon Brand Registry” if you can demonstrate a registered trademark.
The registered trademark is therefore a worthwhile investment, ideally right at the beginning of your startup.
Until December 6, 2024, you have the opportunity to have your trademark application funded by up to €1,000 by the European Union as part of the so-called SME Fund. The conditions for successfully applying for the funding are quite straightforward:
The financial assistance is available to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs with a maximum of 250 employees and a maximum annual turnover of €50 million) that meet the following conditions:
- Your company must be established in the European Union (EU), regardless of its legal form. A limited liability company is not a mandatory requirement.
- It must be able to provide a VAT identification number (UID) or a tax ID.
- The company must not have received any EU financial support in 2024 for the registration of brands or designs.
You can apply for the funding directly with the EUIPO in Alicante. However, law firms like ours can also prepare the funding application for you and submit it to the office. We have prepared more information on this with a form for the easy application here.
