You’ve worked hard to get your product or service to market. You’ve spent considerable hours in R&D, dealing with customers and not to mention all the costs involved! Face it, you’ve done a great job to build your brand. Now is the time to protect it, as the cases of abuse of intellectual property are at all time highs.
If you do not take action to prevent and reduce the cases of your brand being used inappropriately, this can lead to confusion between your product and the counterfeit product. This can also come with negative reviews, whether real or fake. Ultimately, you may suffer financial loss and loss of time if you do not take sufficient action to prevent and resolve any issues that come up.
Prevention is better than curing
Securing a trademark is important to protect your brand. There have been instances where an unregistered trademark could be protected, a registered trademark is usually seen as safer and is more common in practice.
You can trademark any part of your product or service which makes it distinctive from others like it. Ie a brand name, whether real (Kraft) or “made up” (Google), distinguishable sounds such as the iPhone ringtone, you can register colors, personal names, recognisable shapes etc. There are endless possibilities and you can trademark different features of your product and for different commercial purposes.
If you notice someone using a feature which you have trademark, it is easy to serve a cease and desist letter. If this is ignored or if the seller does not get back to you, this can be escalated to the courts. This fairly routine process makes it easy to take action fast. If you do not have a trademark registered, the process could be more difficult to initiate and complete.
How can brand protection enforcement help?
Here, at Brand TKO, we scan the internet for potential infringement issues using selected keywords and images. This makes the process, for you, feel automated and simple. We work on detecting these issues as soon as they arise.
When we do find a potential fraudulent use of your brand, we begin the take down process through the proper channels. This saves you time filing your own cease and desist letters and eradicates the need of hiring a law firm to submit the claim for you.
All this is tracked in our ticket system for maximum transparency. You just sit back and watch as we find threats to your brand, initiate the removal process and confirm when this is complete. Sounds simple? Even better, every month you receive a summary regarding your brand, which could give you important information if you want to avoid such situations in the future.
In conclusion, protecting the brand you’ve worked hard to build is possible but will require scanning the internet and working towards removing any fraudulent abuse of your brand. All that aside, you can make this process feel automatic, by using a brand protection enforcement agency.