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How can I make my trademark less descriptive of my business offering?

Written by Jan Buza

Co-founder of Trama

The most effective approach is to create distance between the mark and the goods or services it covers. Descriptive marks fail because they simply tell consumers what the product is rather than identifying where it comes from.

There are three main ways to make a brand name more distinctive:

Invent a completely coined word with no prior meaning (like Xerox for printers)
Use an existing word in a completely unrelated context (like Apple for computers)
Create a suggestive mark that implies a quality without directly describing it (like Netflix for streaming services)

If changing the name entirely is not practical, registering a figurative trademark incorporating a distinctive logo element can sometimes achieve registration where the wordmark alone would not, since the visual element adds distinctiveness to the overall mark.

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