Effective brand development and protection goes far beyond trademark registration. Intellectual property rights are just one element of a brand. As a business operator, you must the elements of your brand that you have secured legal rights to are the same elements that resonate with the market. Otherwise, what has your trademark registration bought you? In order to have those brand elements resonate with the market, you must feed the market with consistent messaging. As social media continues to offer more venues to compete in for the hearts and minds of your customers, the challenge to effectively and efficiently delivering your message and brand experience has grown exponentially.
Many of our clients struggle with choosing the right mark for their goods or services. We teach them that a highly distinctive mark that is neither suggestive nor descriptive of the goods or services will ultimately be the most protectable, but are also the most difficult (and expensive) to establish in the customer’s mind. Many clients choose suggestive marks or descriptive mark that have limited legal protection. To their chagrin, they find the landscape for competing marks to be more crowded the more descriptive they are. Google searches reveal several entities with similar marks and messages from domains that only differ in their extension. Each social media site they go to, they find their brand or mark is already registered, along with two or three variations. Some of the existing registrants are competitors, and others are mere squatters that foresaw to opportunity to get paid to deliver the domain or username to someone in your position. Clients have difficulty getting their voice heard through the noise of similarly suggestive or descriptive brand messages.
WISES has expanded the scope of its services to protect your brand in the digital era. In addition to our traditional trademark services, we provide comprehensive social media and domain registration services, including in-depth research into the social media landscape that has proven to be especially valuable in our clients’ brand development processes. For any proposed or existing trademark, we can (1) identify web domains that would be advisable to tie up, and then register them on your behalf, and (2) identify the top 100 or more social media sites on which your brand should and can be registered, and register your mark as a username on those sites within one week.
Will you ever be active on 10 domains or 100 social media sites? No, we bet you will not, and you probably have no reason to do so. The purpose is to (1) register and protect the usernames on the social media sites that you will use, and (2) eliminate any potential for others to benefit from your good name on other sites.
We are particularly watchful of emerging domains and social media sites, so you may find that you are registered on the next Pinterest or Instagram before you come to know you should be.
We are excited about the impact we are making for brand owners and brand developers with this new service. It is helping clients develop brands that penetrate all corners of the digisphere and give them a fighting chance to deliver the constant and consistent message that all business owners strive for.
For more information, including costs and application sheets please feel free to call us or send us an email.