As entrepreneurs, your company and its products and services carry your unique mark in them, we will help you secure it. Building new brand identity in a competitive and diverse market is absolutely crucial for recognition and reach. It plays a vital role in attracting the target customer base as well as the attention of potential investors. A crucial aspect of building your brand’s unique identity is a trademark. It guarantees a uniform quality of the product or service to the customer or consumer and builds reliability with both the customers/consumers and with potential investors. Trademark registration in India is regulated under the terms of the Trade Marks Act 1999.

Generally, a trademark has to fulfil certain legal criteria in order to complete the registration process successfully. They are:

• The mark should be capable of being represented in a graphic form, in a paper form.
• It should be able to distinguish the goods or services of the applicant from those of others.
• It should be proposed to use or used in relation to goods and services for indicating a connection in course of trade of goods or services to the person having the rights to use the mark along with or without the identity of the said person.

You can now trademark a number, a letter, a word, a phrase/slogan, a logo/graphics, a sound mark, a smell, a mix of colours, or any combination of the above under the Act to give your brand a distinct identity. Registering your trademark provides legal protection to a brand from possible infringements from imitators. It provides exclusive rights of ownership which is crucial to a brand’s uniqueness.
Once an initial application is filed, it is then analyzed and processed by a branch office of the Trade Marks Registry, depending on the location of the principal place of business of the applicant. It is then again examined at the head office of the Registry at Mumbai. The complete registration process itself will take 15-18 months. A brand can use the trademark symbol ™ or the service mark symbol SM along with your trademark as soon as the initial application is filed. The whole application process can be done completely online. The registered trademark insignia Ⓡ can be used with the trademark once the whole registration process is approved by the Office of Controller General of Patents, Design & Trade Marks. The registration is valid for a period of 10 years from the date of the initial application, after which it can be renewed again for another 10-year period.