The Marketing Perspective

Starting with the marketing perspective, again the brand needs to set you apart. That's really the reason why the trademark offices and trademark laws around the world don't allow you to trademark descriptive terms because the point of a trademark is to not let you own the category. The purpose of a trademark is to allow you to stand apart in that category from among hundreds of other competitors who may sell the same product.

What Sets You Apart?

When you're thinking of a brand, think about this from this perspective. Will this brand allow my customers, my prospective customers, to tell my brand, my product, my service apart from the same product or service of everyone else? If the answer to that is no, then you're not looking at a very strong brand. What you need to focus on is your brand needs to be memorable. People need to be able to remember what it is, so they can tell their friends about it. They can tell their partners about this. That's how the brand grows, right? It needs to be memorable.

What Distinguishes Your Product or Service?

It also needs to be, again like I said, able to distinguish you apart from everyone else who does the same thing. When that's done, you need to have somebody do a proper trademark search for you to make sure that the name you came up with is actually not the name that's similar or what's called confusingly similar to a name that has previously been trademarked by somebody else, because again, then it's their brand. It's not really your brand. It'll be very difficult for you to own it.

Modifying a Brand: Is it Necessary?

Sometimes we get requests. How much do we need to modify our brand so that it can coexist with somebody else's brand in a similar product and services industry? The answer to that is, well, the less you modify this, the weaker your brand is going to be, because if two relatively similar brands are allowed to coexist, then the next person that comes to the same market will always have an argument, "Well, you've allowed two. There's a place for three.” Then there's a place for four, and there's a place for five.

At the end of the day, you end up with a brand that means nothing, because yes, you may be able to protect the brand from identical replication, but it'll be pretty difficult to protect this from anything but blind copying, right? Some creative changes by somebody else would be sufficient for them to overcome any problems.

What Is the Perfect Brand?

When you think of what's a perfect brand, the perfect brand is something that's not like something that's already out there, right? That was the case with the most famous brands, Coca-Cola, Apple, Microsoft, DreamWorks, Google. I'm just listing the companies that I used to do some work for. All of those great companies have brands that are memorable.

They're memorable precisely because they didn't say, "Well, you know, there's this other competitor that we have. What if we tweak a word or two here and there, uh, and then we're going to have a good brand?" Well, maybe it's a good brand, but it's not really your brand. It's their brand, just slightly modified. When you're looking for the perfect brand, look for something that's going to set you aside and let your customers tell you apart from them.