Patent, Trademark & Copyright : Law Office of Kloss, Stenger & LoTempio

When starting a new business one of the first things that needs to be done is to create a brand. Branding establishes the first impression that your target audience has of your business. Existing businesses sometimes need to re-create their brand.

I once asked an attorney "why does the public perceive you as the best personal injury attorney?" And he simply replied “because we told them in our advertisements.”

So if you're starting a new business or you own an existing business and your look is getting old and you need to upgrade or simply change and you need a fresh set of eyes to look at the situation where do you go?

I found Reagan Burns the owner and creative director at Lime Creative. Reagan and I had a nice conversation and she answered a few questions for me regarding marketing and branding issues.

What are some things a new business should be aware of regarding branding?

So when you're starting a new business you need to create advertising material, packaging, and trade dress of your actual place of business that says "this is who we are."

• Branding
• Advertising
• Marketing

Branding equals "look and feel of the company." The logo operates to allow consumers to identify with the company. We help determine what the company needs such as a logo, slogan or tagline.

How do you come up with new ideas without stepping on other people's legal rights?

When coming up with new ideas we have to be aware of trademark issues and copyright issues. This is where it's important to find a trademark attorney to perform a trademark search and file an application for trademark or copyright registration. Our company will pass clients onto patent and trademark attorneys to determine whether or not a federal trademark has previously been registered.

How do you come up with new ideas?

Our job is to determine what theme you're looking for. For example, a modern versus traditional look in which the target audience can relate. What is the look and feel of the company? How do you present yourself to the world?  Who do you want to become?

You can worry about efficiency while we worry about branding. In fact, not only do we love branding, but we also love worrying about advertising, and marketing, and designing, and inventing creative ways to add a little pizzazz and flavor to your business.

What do you do as far as following up with your branding plan?

Once we come up with a marketing plan it's important to implement it with consistency. Advertising should be memorable and uniformly consistent. Things like color codes and JPEG pixelation's should be consistent throughout the branding. Everything should have a unified feeling and the marketing plan should repeat the trademark over and over.

What rights does the branding company maintain?

Our client maintains all rights to use their logos as they see fit, whereas we maintain portfolio rights in all our work. Portfolio rights allow our company to maintain examples of our work to promote our business.

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What Inventors Need to Know...

Tom Demitry is an entrepreneur, an inventor, a salesman, a marketer, a man of ideas and as he will tell you first and foremost a father and a man of God. He is constantly coming up with new ideas and new ways to reinvent himself. His passion and enthusiasm are endless.

I met Tom about 10 years ago when I first became a patent attorney and he was looking for someone to help him file a patent application and get a patent for his invention, the PaintMat (PDF). Little did he know that he was my first client! It was the beginning of a long term working relationship and friendship.

Although that product never really became a financial success, Tom took the PaintMat idea across the country selling the product he had patented, manufactured and marketed and learned a lot of lessons in the process.

Since then he started a new endeavor selling baseball caps and various styles of hats with a Christian theme and marketing the hats under the registered trademark (.PDF) SpiritDomes®. This time it seems that Tom is on his way.

I thought a blog post about him might give inspiration and guidance to other inventors and entrepreneurs who are starting out. Here are a couple questions and answers from our interview:

How did you establish a national brand and hat line in this difficult economic climate?

I have 30 years experience in the head-wear business and I received my vision in church on one fateful Sunday. I was thinking of ways I could spread the word of God and had an awesome idea that was very unique in the industry. 

The idea is to imprint a quote from scripture on the under-visor of my product and design the artwork for a hat around the particular quote from the bible; a "SpiritDome".

No one in the world was doing this so I wanted to establish my own unique niche. Being different than everyone else is what helped the brand really take off. The key is to be different and it is what our target consumer, the youth of today want to be- unique and different!

What have you done to protect your idea?

I thought the best way to protect my brand was by filing for a registered trademark. I filed a trademark application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) through KlossLaw and SpiritDomes was a registered trademark within one year of filing. I believe a registered trademark is the best protection available because no one can ever use it in business. It's also versatile in that I can create product line extensions with the brand and the new products would carry the same protection.

What else do you do to build brand recognition?

I've always felt that if a brand was started at the grassroots level and done consistently over a long period of time, that would be the greatest protection of all. Next, all consistent marketing done to promote building the brand such as signage, promo cards, websites, Twitter, facebook, Linkedin, labels, etc. helps to shape the brand properly as well. What's great about the times we live in is that network marketing to get the word out is affordable and effective. The internet is amazing!

Another thing we're doing is partnering with producers, directors, musicians, speakers, etc. to spread the word about our brand.  The value of word of mouth really adds up. We also label our products with SpiritDomes.com to promote our website so that the public knows of and has a direct link to us. The web page is the easiest way to learn more about what we do.

What is the value of Trademark and brand recognition?

Building a profitable company is what we all try to do. The company builds equity in assets like inventory, real property and cash which have a value or net worth. The beautiful thing about brand building is that the brand name itself has what you call Brand Equity. The brand and goodwill in the company itself has value that can be sold for profit depending how famous it becomes.  Just like real-estate appreciates in value when people recognize the great location, the brand gains in value as more people know and recognize the name and associate it with a company that provides a quality product.

"A patent is limited by time but a trademark can last forever if the brand is built consistently and properly over time."

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