Developing a Long-Term Strategic Vision With Trademarks

Hello. Happy first day of the work week. I hope you had a wonderful, relaxing, long weekend. I did not, well, I'm assuming so because I'm recording this before Memorial Day weekend, but Memorial Day weekend is, I think of it as the start of summer. Traditionally, my family, we would go up to the lake, put the boats in the water, do all of like the spring cleanup work that needs to be done with a three-season cabin. And so my family is there going this weekend, but I don't think I'm going to because, well, for happy reasons.

So my fiancé and I are under contract on a house, a new-to-us house, and that means putting my house on the market. So we are currently scrambling to get everything packed up, lots of packing, lots of cleaning, and getting my house ready to stage for selling. So that was my long weekend. But it's still a great, happy thing.

So, anyways, now that we are settling back into the work week, this is going to be the final episode in our little run on trademarks as a topic for a little while. So we've talked about what they are, how to register them, why they're helpful to you, but we haven't gone a whole lot into strategy. So in this episode, I want to talk about the strategic value of a trademark in your business and how it can actually help you achieve long-term goals and guide your vision for your business.

Hey, I'm Amy Nesheim, licensed attorney for online business owners and founder of my own business, Artful Contracts. You're listening to Legal Made Easy, the show that makes the legal aspects of online business easy to understand and implement so you can grow your business with confidence knowing you've got it all covered. Let's dive in.

A trademark, at its basics, is a way of protecting your branding. And if you talk to any brand designer, they're gonna tell you that your branding should be strategic, it should be related to your long-term goals, and it should help move your business forward. So the same goes for trademarks because a trademark is an element of your branding, a specific element of your branding.

As a refresher, it's a word, phrase, symbol, or design that identifies the source of a good or service. So it is a thing that you, a customer, can see, hear, perceive in some way that tells them where a product is coming from, what company a product is coming from. So that might be a business name, a course name, a product name, a product line, a slogan, a logo, etc. It's a specific item of your branding, and you trademark it to get protection so that no one else can use it.

Trademarking that branding item, registering a trademark with the US PTO, it's the only way to get protection in that branding item across the US. So when you're deciding whether to register, because obviously with that rundown, you have a lot of trademarks in your business. Every business has a lot of trademarks. The question is which ones do you want to register and when?

So there are kind of two main elements to the decision to register a trademark, especially as small business owners. One of those is going to be an emotional element. But then the other one is strategic. So the emotional piece is pretty obvious. Do you have a piece of your branding that you love? Are you really attached to your business name? Are you really attached to your logo? How would you feel if somebody else copied it? How would you feel if you had to stop using it? A lot of that decision can be either fear-based of you don't want someone else to copy you, or just like on the more positive side, just like pride and love of everything that you've put into your brand and like the desire to protect it.

So yeah, that's a huge element of it, especially as solo business owners and personal brands, because our brands are so personal, right? But we're also business owners, so that's not the only consideration, and it's maybe not even the most important consideration. The other half of it is strategic. At a basic level, you should only really register a trademark for something that you plan to use for a long time in your business, which is why I don't always recommend registering a logo because a logo is more likely to change. The registration process itself takes over a year. So if you're not even gonna use it for a year, then you can't even get through the process, right? So it's an investment of time and money. You want to make sure that you're committed to whatever branding item you're registering before you even get into that process.

So on the business side of it, you might think about, you know, how much have you already invested in your branding? How much would a rebrand cost? Would you lose momentum in your marketing? If you would, would you lose client recognition if you had to change your branding? Some of that has emotional elements to it, but it's also just like a strategic business choice. Is it bad business if you have to change your business name? Are you going to lose time and money and goodwill with your customers and all of that if you have to change a certain piece? And if so, registering it is a way to prevent that.

So that's like surface level of the business decision of registering a trademark. But it can go a lot deeper, a lot bigger than that, too. Beyond that, beyond just the time and money you've invested or the cost to your business, registering a trademark can also be a strategic decision that helps you move towards a greater long-term goal or long-term vision for your business. And it can do that by creating a cohesive element that stretches across various elements of your business and ties them all together.

So is there a phrase or a word that you use in your business now or plan to start using that has the potential to expand into different offerings over time so that you can create a cohesive, recognizable brand among different offerings, different product lines? And usually, it's gonna start with something you already use or have an idea of, like a business name or a specific product name or a slogan, but it can then over time evolve into something bigger that ties your entire brand together.

So I'm gonna give you a little example so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about. So let's say that you are a mindset coach and you have a coaching program right now that you call Mindset Mastery. I just made this up. I don't know if somebody already has that or not. But if you use it, I'm gonna give you some ideas. All right, so you decide you have this program, it's your signature coaching program called Mindset Mastery. So you decide to trademark the phrase Mindset Mastery in association with coaching.

In the future, you could create a self-paced course called Mindset Mastery, the Course, or Mindset Mastery for Beginners, or, you know, add some words onto the end to show that it's a different product, right? And then your coaching program and your course are going great, and so you decide to release a journal that you know your clients can use, or that's like an entry-level product, the Mindset Mastery Journal of Daily Prompts and Exercises to Manage Your Mindset. And then you release motivation cards or a monthly membership with mindset challenges or a high-level mastermind, all of them with the branding of around Mindset Mastery.

You can start with this one trademark that you secured at the beginning for one purpose, and then begin to create an ascension ladder of interrelated offers that all help your ideal customer achieve one result. And that's where we're talking higher-level big thinking strategy. Because imagine if you got halfway through creating those integrated offers and they all had the same branding, and then you found out that somebody else had already trademarked it. That'd be a problem. You'd be, you would lose the momentum you were building, you would have to start over, you no longer have a unique and unified brand.

And I used coaching as an example, but it doesn't even have to be coaching. There are lots of ways that you can start as a service provider, start as an educator or an expert of some kind or a coach, and then add in tangentially related products that help your client get to a certain goal. If you're a fitness coach, you could add in supplements or exercise equipment or something that has a similar brand. If you help people train their dogs, you can add in dog toys or treats for positive reinforcement. If you're a web designer, you can create website templates. There are lots of different ways, no matter what you do, that you can add on additional products. And maybe this is very far down the line. It's just something to think about as you're developing your brand, even if you're in the beginning. Do I have the potential to expand? Does this brand that I'm choosing now have the potential to lead into something more? And should I protect it now to protect that bigger vision?

All right, to bring this home a little bit more, I want to talk about a case study. So I think Michael Hyatt is a really good example of what I'm talking about here. So Michael Hyatt has a company that he started as Michael Hyatt and Co. And he started as a productivity coach, and a lot of his branding and the stuff that he taught centered around the idea of focus. He had some courses that helped parents focus, helped leaders focus, that kind of thing. And then he released a book called Free to Focus. It's a great book. I recommend it. And then as his business grew and developed for a while, he released the Full Focus Planner. I use my Full Focus Planner every day. Highly recommend.

But, anyways, he released this Full Focus Planner. It had this concept of focus that he had been working and developing as he grew his business. And then he continued to grow and lean into that Full Focus brand by releasing the Full Focus Journal, the Full Focus Notebook, Full Focus courses, etc. He took that phrase Full Focus and used it across a bunch of different products that his company produced. And now he even has a certification program for other coaches who want to teach the Full Focus Planner method how to use a Full Focus Planner.

And then last year, Michael Hyatt, he started his company a long time ago, I think in the early 2000s or earlier. So he's at, you know, towards the end of his career, he decided to start removing himself from his business so that he could retire. But up until that point, the business was named after him. It was Michael Hyatt and Co. So, and he was the face of the business. So he had to figure out how do I, as a personal brand, transition out of my business. And so they decided to lean even more into that brand that they had been creating and building for so long over the years, and they ended up renaming the entire business Flow Focus.

So now they have a cohesive business name and product suite, all with recognizable and consistent branding. If you're curious about that process of removing him from the face of the business and the whole rebrand, they talked about it a lot on their podcast last summer. Their podcast is Business Accelerator, is what it's called. But, anyways, it's just a great example of how he had this concept. So at the beginning, it started as this concept of helping people focus because he was a productivity coach and he really honed in on that over the years and found this brand of Full Focus and then really leaned into having cohesive branding and using Full Focus for a lot of products and then ultimately his business name.

And now that he's not the face of the company and it has a different name and it has all this cohesive branding and trademarks to go registered trademarks to go along with every single piece of it, he can sell it. All of that is an asset. Each trademark, as well as the recognition and the goodwill that's created by that cohesive branding, all of that is an asset that increases the value of the business. And he could sell the whole business if he wanted to, or he could sell the Full Focus aspect of his business because he has a coaching side and then he has a product side as well. So the product side is largely centered around this Full Focus branding. So he could peel that off and sell it and sell his, you know, his journal shop thing on its own and keep the coaching side of it. He has options. Creating this whole brand strategy and building it up over the years and protecting it over the years, he has options now.

Now, I'm not saying that you have to have this huge plan mapped out before you register a trademark.This type of product suite and cohesive branding takes time. You don't even have to want a huge business or growth like that. You don't have to have this big vision of, you know, offices and tons of employees and that kind of thing. You can absolutely register a trademark no matter how small your business is, no matter if you're just one person, no matter how big you want to get or how small you want to stay. This is just an example of how one trademark can support a long-term vision and create a long-term strategy, supporting a cohesive brand. And it's a lot easier to build on a brand that you know is available, that you know is not already being used by someone else, and that you've protected from the beginning.

And you can tell, I mean, just by looking, so I looked up all of Michael Hyatt's trademarks when I was researching this, and you can tell just based on the dates that he's filed all the trademarks; this is something that took a long time. He registered his first trademark related to the idea of focus in the mid-2000s. So this has been a long time in the making. If you asked him back then, he probably would have had no idea that this is where this is all going, right? So it's not something that you have to know at the beginning, but understanding the strategic value of a trademark and what it can do for you can help you in your decision-making process in the beginning when you're branding or when you're naming a new specific offer.

And you can ask yourself, is this a phrase that has the potential for multiple uses? Is this something that I can build upon in the future if I want to? And part of the reason for that is that once you have that first trademark with the phrase, it's much more likely that you'll succeed in getting other trademarks for the same phrase for different products or for the similar phrase, you know, extended out. And just to clarify on that, you can trademark the phrase without the product name or with it. So as the example, "Full Focus" by itself is a trademark, "Full Focus Journal" is a trademark, "Full Focus Planner" is a trademark. He registered a lot of them. "Full Focus" plus the product name, and you can do it either way. So once you have the "Full Focus Journal," it's easier to register the "Full Focus Planner," etc.

Now to just go to the other side of this a little bit, you did—I'm not saying you have to do this for every single one of your trademarks. There are going to be trademarks where this makes sense, and you want to create a whole product suite out of it, and there are going to be trademarks where it's just a one-off item, and you just want to trademark the name of the item, and that's all it is. So, to use myself as an example, my signature program is called "Cover Your Assets." When I named that program, I did not think about, you know, using that name as something to expand into other things, but it's my signature program. I want it to be unique. I want it to have its own name, that it's not linked to other things; it's not one of many. It is one. It is the one thing. So you might have trademarks in your business that you want to be unique and refer to only one thing. And then you might have others that become a unifying element among all your offers in your branding. You can have different trademarks that serve different purposes in your business.

So the next time that you are working on your branding or naming a new product line or choosing a tagline, maybe this is something you think about. Can you use this phrase that you're using, that you're thinking of, in other ways? Is it something that is flexible that could be used as a unifying element across all of your branding? Or is it the product that you're naming? Is it something that you want to be unique and have its own name? And then is that worth protecting, whichever one it is? Is it something that you want to have protected and make sure that you can use for a long time? And if so, maybe it's time to register a trademark.

If you think it could be the right time to register your trademark, or if you just want more information about the process, why it might be a good idea, I have a free video guide that walks through what a trademark is, why you might need to register one, what the process looks like, how you can work with me to register your trademark, all of it. It's a short video, and there's also a PDF if you are more of a visual processor. So head on over to artfulcontracts.com/trademark-video to sign up for that, or I'll put the link in the show notes too. I do have a couple of spots for trademark clients in June. So sign up for that video, and that will show you the next steps to get started, or send me a DM on Instagram. I'm happy to talk through it with you.

All right, that's it for this one. I'll be back in two weeks.