Business Names, Product Names, Trademarks

One small thing that can be a big thing is your Business Name. You need to to choose, register and protect it. Your decisions don't stop there, however:

Will you operate under a fictitious name? Will you use your business name, some variation of it or are you choosing a new name altogether for your products and services? How will you protect the name? Will you have a website and will you register a domain name for the website? Can your naming choices help you draw customers to your business and sell products?

The answer to the last question is yes! A good naming strategy will help customers to recognize your business and its producst or services and will connect them as a potential solutions to their wants and needs. It will help prepare customers to learn your names and then learn more difficult and complex information about your business and its products, as well as associate postive ideas and attitudes towards your business and its products.

For a web business, familiarity and branding as noted above applies equally well. Addtionally, it is important that the customer recognize and recall the brand name as a web address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator), that is the path the customer might try to type in the browser window if they don't know your full web address. Registering your name as a domain name (DNS system ) also aids in protecting your name from use by other businesses in a manner similar to a registered trademark.

Your business naming strategy will include the following:

Naming Your Business or Products

Trade or Business Name - Used to identify a business as distinct from its products and services.  

Corporate Name - Name given to a corporation when it is formed. 

Fictitious Business Name - A business name different from the owner’s name(s) (including corporations.

Brand Name - Given to products and services to:

• distinguish them from other products or services

• allow customers to identify and find products or services

• prepares customers to receive, store and recall information more readily

Trademark - a word, phrase, design or symbol that identifies a business’s products.

Service Mark - a word, phrase, design or symbol that identifies the provider of a service.

Logo - a particular artistic expression of the name or symbol.
Click here for classic Icons & Logos | click here for Local Logos

color versus B & W
Aptos Coffee Roasting Company
http://www.panachelotions.com/

Trademark Registry - a list of all trade and service marks registered with the Federal government. All States have trademark registries too; some have service mark registries.

It will cost you $245 to register your trademark with the Federal Registry. You need to do a proper and thorough trademark search which you can learn to do or hire a paralegal organization to do for you for $300-500 more. You will be safer with a trademark lawyer but will pay perhaps $1,500 or more. Also, register your domain name with an Internic accredited domain registrar. http://www.internic.net/regist.html

• ™ is used when declaring a trademark under common law
• ® is used when you have registered your trademark

Once you register a trademark, in order to maintain your trademark you must seek out infringements, issue warning letters requesting offenders to cease and desist use and prosecute in court if necessary.

Pre-existing Federal registrations have priority.