A trademark is a big part of a brand. It makes the products and services of a business stand out from others. It can be a word, phrase or logo, and can even be a shape, colour, sound, aspect of packaging or any combination of these. A trademark is a marketing tool so that customers can easily recognise products or services.

You need to register your trademark separately from registering your company – registration at Companies House gives you no rights to prevent others using the name of your company and neither does owning the domain name for your website.

Trademarks are registered for a fee by the Intellectual Property Office (the 'IPO') in the UK. An application to register a trademark costs between £170 (done online) and £200 (done by post). You can use the ‘Right Start’ service to check that your application meets the rules for registration. More information is available here.

Please see here for the application page.

Trademarks must be renewed every ten years, but you can renew them as many times as you need to, for as many years as you are using it. Registered trademarks can be identified by the ® symbol.

The most effective trademarks are those ‘distinctive’ to the goods and services they protect. This allows consumers to identify your goods or service from your competitors'.

Once you have registered your trademark:

• It will be less likely that anyone else will try to use it without your permission.
• It will make it much easier for you to take legal action against anyone who uses your trademark without your permission.
• It will allow Trading Standards Officers or the Police to bring criminal charges against counterfeiters if they use your trademark.
• It means you can sell it, franchise it or let other people have a licence that allows them to use it.

Not everything can be registered as a trademark. Trademarks which can be difficult to register include those which:

• purely describe the products you sell or the services you offer, for example ‘dark chocolate’;
• are based on common phrases, like ‘Putting Customers First';
• are common features for all products in that trade, for example ‘4 x 4’ for cars;
• include a protected sign (an emblem which is protected under an international agreement), for example, the ‘Red Cross’ or the ‘Olympic Rings’;
• are offensive, such as containing swear words or pornographic images;
• trick the consumer, for example if it deliberately looks like another brand; and