Trademarks

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Trademarks are a communication tool between a company and consumers.
In order to choose a trademark that represents a company and is its essence, recognisable on the market, you must start by considering the message you want to convey, the image you want the public to perceive.
This is why the trademark must acquire its own strategically effective commercial value, with the aim of enhancing the company on the market and guaranteeing the reliability and quality of its products/services.

What is a trademark?

A trademark is a distinctive sign capable of identifying the origin/provenance of a company's goods and/or services compared to those of competing companies. The ultimate goal is to create a trademark that is

Distinctive

Novel

Original

Lawful

and guarantees validity, so as to attract consumer attention and induce them to purchase that product/service instead of another.

Trademark types

Trademarks can be classified based on:

  • Business activities (factory brand, sales brand, service brand)

  • Amount of goods/services covered by the trademark (general brand and specific brands)

  • Protection intensity (strong and weak brand)

  • Brand composition (name and figurative brand, colour brand, sound and olfactory brand)

  • Product shape (shape or three-dimensional brand)

In the trademark registration procedure, the assessment for the purposes of filing the application cover the composition and form of the trademark, its availability on the market and the choice of services and/or products to be protected.

Why protect a company trademark?

In a highly competitive market with a wide choice of products and services made and distributed by competing companies, it is essential to protect your corporate identity, starting from your own trademark.

Trademark rights

The first useful step is therefore to create a budget for trademark registration, with which the owner acquires the right to:

Benefit from its exclusive use in all the territories covered by the registration (national, EU, international);

Prohibit third parties from using identical or similar trademarks, covered by the registered trademark, which may lead to acts of unfair competition, creating a risk of confusion in the consumer's choice of purchase.

The second step is certainly the guarantee of use of the registered trademark on the market.
Furthermore, registration guarantees strong protection from the so-called unregistered “de facto trademark”, which due to its effective and constant use on the market is still protected by the Italian legal system, but with a clearly reduced protection capacity.
In fact, if a dispute were to arise, the “de facto trademark” is penalised with respect to a registered trademark, as it is necessary to be able to provide proof of use of the actual sale of the products/services with a certain date.
Consequently, if you intend to start a company or a new business, it's best to design an effective business strategy from the outset to protect your trademark from possible infringements of rights and counterfeiting.

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