A Comprehensive Overview of Trademark and Brand Registry


A trademark offers uniqueness to your brand at the same time it confers the right to protect your intellectual property against any misuse by a third party. It is a way to distinguish your product, goods, services, or business from your competitors or the rest in your niche or category.

Trademark refers to any word, services name, product design, or logo that is registered to your company. It Helps the people to distinguish your products, goods, or services from the rest in your niche or category.

Key benefits of Trademark

Being trademarked is a synonym for making your business secure and protecting it. Trademark tags all your services or products as yours, which cannot be replicated by any third party.

This makes it safe and reliable for the business owner as well as prevents the customer from purchasing any fake goods or services. A third party might try to use your name, keeping the consumer’s trust built in you.

Unique Identity Mark

Trademarks are crucial as they provide you with a unique identity mark. Just a name, logo, color, or design of a company can help the customers connect with your brand. Customers do need not to read the details to know about who is offering this product, a trademark can do all this work.

For instance, a person seeing the logo of Adidas on a shoe need not read the details of the product to know what this brand is all about.

Mark of quality, standard, and reputation

Whenever a customer sees a trademark of a company, all the memories related to that brand are recalled in his mind. Now he knows what products and what sort of quality this company is offering.

Seeing a Louis Vuitton logo on a shoe or Gucci mark on a bag will ultimately take one’s mind to those high-quality luxury products they are offering. He can blindly pick any product having that logo without having a second thought about quality.

Imagine if some local store starts using their names and selling cheap bags with poor quality, now the reputation and quality will be affected. Here jumps in the trademark to save the day and protect the standard that a brand is offering.

Customer protection

A market run by companies but thrives, survives, and lives on a wide consumer set. It took years of hardship, struggle, and investment to make a bond of trust with customers. Look it like that, Ferrari is a name for speed, looks, comfort, and stability. Now suppose many small, big, and cheap companies start making cars using the trademark of Ferrari.

Now a conflict of choice will arise every time a consumer wants to buy a Ferrari. It will confuse even discerning buyers and desist them from buying it. Such vague market choices will lead them to buy something they do not desire.

Secure a market grip

To make customers trust your brand takes years of marketing. Some Companies that take the trademarking seriously and work on branding gain such a spot in the market that is nearly impossible to beat. This enhances the importance of having a trademark, so a company cannot only protect its intellectual property from misuse but also make its reputation undiminished. 

Financial Benefits

All the struggle and fuss of trademarking, marketing, and branding somewhere ends up in financial interest. A trademark where helps a company attain an unshakeable reputation in the market, at the same time it makes it easy for a company to generate more money from the stock market, or borrow from the lenders to expand.

A company having a good reputation in the market gain more opportunities regarding collaboration and making partners.

Apart from these key benefits, Getting your trademark registered put you in a strong position and made you able to,

·       Cease a business that is using your registered name on their products or services

·       Take legal action on infringements

·       Access to the court for demanding compensation for the loss you possibly face while getting fake items sold using your brand name

·       Build trust between the consumer and the company

·       Running your business securely without any interruptions

Don’t Just Trademark and Forget

Have you successfully registered your brand and it is not working out? Are you planning to hold on to your operations for a while to analyze the market? For any reason, it is to be kept in mind that a trademark abandoned is of no use. The concerned legal authorities may find that the person has left his right to use the brand, and thus, your trademark can be made available for other companies to adopt.

Therefore, in the US, you need to fulfill some criteria that make you able to stay the owner of your trademark. This includes post-trademark check and balance, where you need to provide evidence after every specific time interval that you have been using the registered trademark on your products and services.

Amazon Brand Registry

Amazon Brand Registry is a program launched by Amazon to facilitate the brand owners that are verified, to get their hands on upgraded reporting tools. It also enables them to get more control across amazon, on their brand. 

As there are millions of products being sold on amazon by several sellers, getting a brand registered on Amazon also has become quite an essential aspect of selling on it. In this fierce competition, you need to have your product secured and protected so that you get a competitive edge, no one sticks with it or makes you lose your brand.

Thus, Amazon offers its Amazon Brand Registry service free of cost to benefit the user in terms of brand protection and brand support.

Brand Protection allows the online amazon sellers to identify their replicated products that are being sold on amazon.

Brand Support offers flexibility in terms of offering minimal effort in completing inquiries from the brand owner’s end. 

To be eligible for the above-mentioned benefits, a brand owner needs to have a registered trademark in every marketplace where he is planning to start an online business in; also, Amazon accepts the brands with the pending trademark application.

How to Trademark

Do you want to reap the advantages of a brand registry? Here is a quick guide as the registration for a trademark has now been made quite easy and can be done online within minutes.

Before plunging into the enrollment, make sure that your brand entirely fulfills Amazon’s eligibility requirements.

Amazon only accepts text or image-based trademarks and registers them on the Amazon account. Moreover, Amazon has a strict country-based trademark policy that means it only accepts trademarks if it is issued by some specific countries as following

United States, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, India, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Singapore, Spain, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Egypt, Sweden, Poland, the European Union, and the United Arab Emirates.

Trademarks are also territorial, which means that you need to file a trademark in every region where you are about to get your business settled, a trademark registered in the UK will not be valid in China. Therefore, remember that you have to get the brand registered separately in every marketplace where you are offering to sell your goods/products or services.

Process Involved in Trademarking

Registration

While applying for a trademark, you might be asked about the category of product or services for which your trademark will be used. What type of trademark do you want to have (generic mark, descriptive mark, logo, phrase, name, etc.)?

After the submission of the application, it is analyzed by the concerned authorities, and feedback is provided. During this process, queries and criticism might be brought forward by the authorities, which have to be resolved. Thus, the process proceeds towards getting your trademark registered, which can take up to 6 months.

Brand Registry

Once you have applied for trademark registration, you will be granted a registration number based on which you can use for a brand registry. A brand registry can be done on Amazon, based on ongoing trademark processing applications.

You need to follow the following criteria to get your brand enrolled in Amazon.

·       An active registered trademark that appears on packaging as well as products.

·       You should be the authorized agent or rightful owner of that trademark, and you can verify that.

·       You must have a seller central or vendor central account on Amazon.

Step 2: Signing to Vendor or Seller central

After fulfilling all the eligibility requirements, you now need to sign in to your already existing vendor central or seller central account. You can sign up by using the credentials that you have provided while making an account.

This sign-up will enables you to access the features and benefits that Amazon Brand Registry is providing.

Step 3: Final enrollment.

You will be asked by Amazon for the following information to quality for Brand Registration.

·       Your brand name with an active trademark

·       A registered trademark number

·       The categories of the product displayed in the form of a list (clothing, apparel, shoe, electronics)

·       Countries from where the manufacturing and distribution are done

Amazon allows you to have faster access to the brand registry for those products that have been listed on amazon and are active at the time of application. After a tenure of six months, your trademark is again checked if it has completed the registration process or not; till then if you are not able to have the trademark registered, amazon might remove all your products from the brand registry.

Cost for Amazon Brand Registry

As discussed earlier, Amazon does not ask for any cost while the brand registers. Yet, to move to that level you need to pass through the brand registry application. This enables you to get a registered trademark.

This registry of trademarks costs you some money. The registered trademark fee usually ranges from $225 to $400. This fee depends upon the protection level you want to have.

Take an Expert with You in This Journey

Trademarking is not just filling out an application and submitting it online; it is more than that. It involves detailed work and minute details that should be considered; otherwise, it can result in the cancellation of your application. SO DO NOT START THIS JOURNEY ALL ALONE. Let Ecommerce-Elite be your companion and allow us to lead you safely to the youth brand registry and provide you the basis of a secure and safe business.

 

 

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