A company’s trademarks its communication tool with consumers, an experience of emotions and perceptions that creates an indelible memory in the consumer’s mind.
For this reason, the initial design of the strategic business plan should consider how to represent your company to the market, the message you want to convey, the image – colours, lines, characters – that can identify the essence of your company.
What emotional strategy must you consider in order for your company’s brand to convey emotions? And is it so original and distinctive that it can catch the consumer’s attention?
Clearly there is no easy, immediate answer: the first step to take in giving your trademark a shape and colour is certainly knowing and identifying the type of distinctive sign that is most appropriate for your company.
The aim is to create a trademark with a simple and recognisable graphic and textual structure. Does that mean it’s better to choose a trademark with words or images?
Trademark types
A first essential distinction is that between trademarks which are:
- textual, consisting exclusively of words, letters, digits or their combination, without graphic elements;
- figurative, consisting of graphic, figurative and colour elements;
- figurative with textual elements, consisting of the combination of words and figurative elements.
Regardless, the choice driven by the business strategy for the trademark that must effectively distinguish a company’s products/services can also be extended to the following aspects of trademarks:
- shapes
- positions
- colours
- movement
- multimedia
- holographs
- sound (alongside other “sensory” aspects of trademarks such as olfactory, gustatory and tactile ones).
Trademarks and the intensity of the distinctive capacity
For the purposes of registration, the choice of trademark is also linked to the intensity of the distinctive capacity, which can be:
- weak – a trademark shouldn’t be overly generic nor descriptive, and doesn’t recall the product or service to which it refers in an overly obvious way, also including the name of the product/service itself;
- strong – an expression of creative and original research that reproduces imaginative elements with the use of words or names that conceptually have nothing to do with the product/service to which they refer.
Therefore, if the name chosen as a trademark has a weak distinctive capacity, it would be best to combine a textual part with an image, so as to promote its distinctiveness.
Similarly, if you opt for a trademark that is only figurative but not particularly original, it may be considered too weak, since it is limited to the image alone.
Which trademark to choose?
So considering this brief overview, what tools can you use to choose your trademark?
Use your emotional capacity to build and enhance your trademark and business and convey the right perception of your product or service to consumers, one which is recognisable, reliable and high quality.
Choose a trademark (name and/or image) that is easy to remember, distinctive compared to competitors, but also simple and attractive.
Plan an entrepreneurial strategy that is consistent with your company’s objectives and needs, where the trademark is at the centre of your communications and promotions of products and services.
Communicate with your target audience so that your trademark represents your company’s image.