Brand Trademarking | What You Need and What You Don’t
Learn how to trademark your company name and tips on how you can do it. Trademarking a business is not as difficult as it seems and doing a search is easier.
Trademarking a Business Name
We hear over and over from our clients here at Brandings, “should I register my company name as a trademark?” The answer is yes unless you are staying local, have no intention of expanding and not doing business on the internet. How many of you reading this blog does this include?
That said, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO.gov) breaks down a trademark into different “Classifications.” One cannot go to the USPTO and say they want to trademark their company across all the classifications. You can only trademark your company in the classifications in which you are using and you have to prove it.
That is why it is possible for United to be trademarked both by the airline and the moving companies. Because the airline has trademarked the airline and the moving trademarked the movers and it is not “confusingly similar” both have a claim to the name and you cannot trademark every classification.
As you can imagine, it is far easier to trademark and take more classifications if you’ve developed a made up name as long as the name is not confusingly similar to a previously trademarked name.
Another thing to consider is you cannot trademark a name that is part of the American vernacular 
unless you are using it a specific manner that is not the actual meaning of the word. For example, you cannot trademark the word “shoe” for shoes. You can’t do it. You can however trademark the word “shoe” for a gravel company or for a specific processing technique for corn.
I hope brief discussion of trademarking a business helped. For a more in-depth description please see Brandings Trademark Business Names article. If you would like to move forward with the Brandings Trademark Screening and Application Service, please feel free to contact us.