Protecting your brand can be of more value than you may realize. A brand with a strong reputation usually has a loyal returning client base. Whether you are selling luxury goods, offer online content sharing services or provide services to businesses or consumers, you want to maintain a strong, trustworthy reputation. Losing sales to infringers and brand dilution are not the only concerns a business should have when it comes to brand protection, but also protecting customers from potentially harmful goods and services and possible scam purchases.

Below are our top five tips to protect your brand:

1.       Secure your intellectual property rights!! It might seem like an obvious point, but many businesses do not think about registering their IP rights until they are dealing with an infringement. The earlier you have your rights registered, the easier taking action can be.

2.       Be consistent with your brand image: the more consistent your image is, the more likely your customers will recognize your products and/or services and be able to pick you out from a potentially crowded marketplace!

3.       Watch out for infringers: investing in a trademark monitoring service can save a lot of trouble further down the line. Remember having a monitoring service in place does not mean you need to have an endless plot of money to go after every possible infringement, but it does mean you can work with your advisors to identify and prioritize the biggest concerns for your business.

4.       Instruct a lawyer to keep a note of renewal dates and other key deadlines; you do not want to lose your registration by accident!

5.       It might be useful for future purposes to collate and keep a record of any ‘evidence’ that shows your use of particular trademarks or other intellectual property (such as any sector-related publications, advertisement, volume of sales per country, etc…)

Tegan Miller-McCormack, a trainee solicitor in the Mergers & Acquisitions/Private Equity practice, contributed to this article.