A Trademark is one of the most
valuable assets of any business. A Trademark is a word, name,
symbol, design, phrase or sound that identifies a business
organization, or its products or services, and distinguishes
it from other business organizations. In other words, a
Trademark is how potential customers recognize your business
and set you apart from your competitors.
A Business must be extremely careful in choosing the names
associated with it, as it can be exorbitantly expensive to
change names midstream. As thousands of businesses have
learned, the result can be devastating in terms of lost
business.
One of the first steps to starting your business is naming
your business. One of the first steps in launching a product
or service is naming the product or service. Before you use
the name, YOU NEED TO KNOW IF THE NAME IS BEING USED BY
SOMEONE ELSE. Finding out the hard way can have a devastating
effect on your business: fines, legal liability, the lost
opportunity cost of having to switch names midstream…
Even if no one else is using the name in your state or
geographic region, a Trademark Search will reveal if someone
is using the name in any part of the country. This is
important to businesses that envision expansion. Every year,
thousands of business owners find out that they are
practically frozen out of expanding to an area with their
business or brand name, as someone in that area has Common Law
Rights to that business name. A Trademark Search will reveal
this scenario upfront, before time, money and effort is put
into building a trade name or brand.
Once the free federal trademark
search is done, you can determine what modifications may be
required, and decide whether a more broad based
search is necessary.
