A quick read on creating strong brands at a reasonable cost
Unusual to the industry, Marcus Woodhouse has been providing brand creation services for almost 10 years. We also create protectable brands. The importance may not be immediately obvious.
Consider these common scenarios:
A business spends thousands of dollars on a new brand only to find that it can’t be legally protected. The branding agency disclaimed all responsibility for this in the agreement you signed. As the brand can’t be protected, it’s likely your competitors can use the name too.
A start up decides not to spend anything on a new brand. But they need a name, so they just quickly choose one and move forward. The business becomes successful but finds other traders using the name. They need to spend thousands of dollars attempting to stop them or, worse still, another trader has already registered the name and they face legal action.
A well-established business spends thousands of dollars on brand creation, and then thousands more on legal advice on protectability. At the end of it all, the brand isn’t protectable.
The answer is to get the whole job completed at Woodhouse IP as a one stop shop. We offer you both creative and legal solutions at very reasonable fixed costs.
I’m now going to share some really useful brand creation tools with you.
A useful brand categorisation tool
Some of the best, and legally protectable, brands feature either
(a) invented words, (b) arbitrary words or (c) suggestive words.
Invented words are ‘coined’ or ‘made up’ words. A good example is KODAK. It is a coined word that means nothing in relation to camera products.
Arbitrary words are already known words, but they mean nothing in relation to the particular products/services. A good example is APPLE for cell phones and computers.
Suggestive words merely allude to the products or services without directly describing them. An example is NORTHFACE for mountaineering clothing/ equipment.
The brands that often create expensive legal issues are the descriptive or generic names. There are definitely strategies to employ for protecting descriptive brands, but it’s almost always more expensive in terms of both protection and enforceability. And if you aren’t aware that this cost could even arise, it can come as a very annoying surprise.
Generic names are not normally chosen as brands. Most people would steer away from calling their milk product MILK!
What process could you use to create a new brand?
If you’re lucky, a name will simply pop into your head. But normally I need to follow a detailed yet highly fluid process that I’ve developed over the years.
The first part of the process involves analysing and understanding:
The brand values of my client’s business.
All aspects of the relevant product or service including why it’s useful for the consumer, and the particular sales environment.
The nature of the prospective customers.
The second part uses a method that employs abstracted or lateral thought processes. During this process I tend to combine two important things. The knowledge gained from my broadly-based academic training (from art, religion and literature to law and political science), along with the practical knowledge I developed from my wide experience working in various trades during my university days.
Once I’ve been through that process, Woodhouse IP works with clients to rank the various options according to the brands they like the most. It’s then time to conduct various levels of trade mark availability searching to locate any possible obstacles. And the final stage is to look strategically at the best way to protect the new brand, usually through the trade mark registration process. This is all done at fixed and reasonable costs that are a small fraction of those normally charged by other branding experts. That's the benefit you get from working with a smaller firm.