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Types Of Trademarks
By Margaret Brown Published: 11/04/2009
The term trademark stands for certain symbols or words that differentiate the goods of one company from the other. The main objective of trademarks is to prevent the customers from getting confused about the origin of a product that they intend to purchase.
One of the critical requirements for a trademark is that it should be distinctly recognizable and not be similar to other marks that are already there in the market. This uniqueness of trademarks is determined by slotting them into four essential categories - suggestive, descriptive, generic, and arbitrary or fanciful.
A descriptive mark recognizes the essential quality or some other characteristics of the product like its function or form. However, marks that are descriptive are not as unique as some other marks and hence, they are not usually capable of being trademarked. Although, if the mark has acquired a secondary identification that is more well known among the customers, it can be successfully trademarked.
Suggestive marks are those which indicate a particular quality of the product. However, consumers might need to stretch their imagination to identify the real link between the product and the mark as there is no obvious link between the two. For instance, the shoes named 'Hush Puppies' are suggestive of comfortable shoes, which make sure that your feet do not become sore. The underlying reason behind the name is that 'barking dogs' is slang for sore feet in some places in the US.
Fanciful marks are those marks that do not have any link whatsoever with the product itself. For instance, the usage of the name 'Apple' for computers is entirely disconnected from the product. In a similar way, arbitrary marks are those that come from the creative imagination of certain people or come from classical languages like Latin.
Finally, generic marks are those which describe a very broad category of items like 'olive oil' and are afforded no protection under the existing trademark laws.