Branding is the marketing practice of creating a name and symbol that identifies and differentiates a product from other products. An effective brand strategy gives an individual a major edge in increasingly competitive markets. A promise made by the company’s brand to a customer is a branding. It tells the customer what they expect from the company’s products and services, and it differentiates the company’s offering from that of its competitors.
A brand is like the difference between a pair of running shoes and a pair of Nikes. A brand is what people feel about you, your product, the service you provide, or your company. It’s part rational but mostly emotional. People will forgive a strong brand if it makes a mistake like New Coke. Likewise, people won’t forgive a weak brand if it makes a mistake like Gateway computers. The secret of a strong brand is the focus. For decades Swedish car maker defines their brand with a single word safety. Well, it seemed to work for them. Sometimes you have to imagine beyond the category to know what you stand for. Harley Davidson makes motorcycles, and they stand for freedom though it does not have a powerful engine, and it is not a reliable bike or a smoother ride.
Branding is vital because it makes a memorable impression on consumers, and it allows your customers and clients to know what to expect from your company. Branding helps you in distinguishing yourself from the competitors and what to offer to the customer that makes you the better choice. Branding helps in building confidence by taking guts, strategy, intelligence, and sometimes maybe risk by the company. Most of the successful brands in the world go to where they are because of a sense of confidence. Most of the successful companies built a powerful brand strategy when they built up emotions for a customer. A strong brand helps the company in building its financial value, such as sales, growth, and breaking into new markets or creating new markets from scratch.
Trademark means a word, phrase, and symbol that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others. In simple terms, a trademark is a specific aspect of the company’s product brand that has legal protection as it is a unique identifier for them. The trademark helps to prevent competitors from stealing the brand image or creating substantially similar identifies to create marketplace confusion.
A trademark protects your brand identity, the symbols, logos, terms, names, and other imagery that represents your goods and services whereas copyright is legal protection over works of authorship, and these are creative works such as books, songs, poetry, photographs, web content, and choreography.
Trademark only protects your intellectual property, and it does not prevent another business from using a similar to yours whereas copyright does not allow other people to create derivative works, reuse, distribute, or reproduce the protected property in any way without permission from the copyright holder.
A trademark protects the identifying marks of a business, whereas a patent grants exclusive ownership and usage rights over a work of authority or creativity. A patent allows exclusive ownership and usage rights over an invention.
Intellectual property is a category of property that involves intangible creations of the human intellect. Intellectual property is the output of innovation, new products, and technologies that are protected so that they can thrive in the marketplace. IP rights offer not only protection also drive commercial success for small, medium, and large enterprises.
A brand is the customer-facing attributes that define a company’s identity. It involves lots of things that can legally protect as intellectual property like logos, brand names, straplines, and design elements such as the red soles on a pair of Christian Louboutin stilettos.
A patent protects new, useful, and non-obvious products, compositions, machines, processes, or an improvement any of these. A patent will protect how a product works, what it does, how it does it, what it made of, and how it made for 20 years. Patents give you a competitive advantage in the market and demonstrate your commitment to protecting your innovation.
Trademark protects a brand or company’s identity. Trademarks can be one or many words, shapes, sounds, or designs such as logos, brand names, and slogans. Registered trademarks can boost investor confidence, build your reputation, and become a revenue source through licensing or franchising. A trademark is a symbol utilize to identify items of intellectual property. The UK laws suggest that trademarks applied to the creation of a brand such as words, sounds, logos, and colors.
A brand is a collection of features that individually or jointly form a company’s identity, and a trademark is a symbol to show that identifying features belongs to a brand.
Compositions and songs are protected by copyrights, as are original literary, artistic, dramatic or musical works, such as performances, sound recordings and communication signals. The owner of the copyright has the sole right to produce and reproduce work or a substantial part of it in any form.
Once your patent is granted, or your trademark, industrial design, or copyright registered by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, IP rights can be used in court as evidence that you own the work.
Intellectual property law is governed by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) at the global level that is a specialized United Nations agency operating in all the world’s major economies and most of the smaller ones. WIPO follows some important functions related to Intellectual Property such as global policy development, IP services, and infrastructure, facilitation of collaboration between member countries, centralized access to information and resources, and trademark applications.
An Intellectual Property Office (IPO) represents each member state at the national level. IPO fulfills the following functions such as trademark applications, patent applications, and advice on intellectual property law and enforcement.
It is necessary to protect intellectual property online. Brands that are selling a large number of products to resellers need to focus on grey market sellers. Grey market sellers are unauthorized third parties selling other companies’ products through channels like eBay and Amazon.
Another best way to discourage grey market sellers on online marketplaces is to report unauthorized usage of product photography. Social listening can be used for catching infringements. Most of the brands use social listening to keep track of customer complaints and to identify marketing opportunities where the brand mentioned. From a brand and trademark protection perspective, it allows the company to track when and where a brand name or item of trademark content used.
