Types Of Trademarks

Trademark protection is granted for terms, logos and graphics that identify goods of one company as distinct from others. The main aim of trademarks is to ensure that the consumers are not subjected to any confusion in relation to the source of the product.

A trademark must be exclusive and remarkably distinct for the customers to recognize it quickly even amongst a crowd of similar goods in the market. The uniqueness of a trademark can be judged on the basis of its placement in one of the trademark categories – descriptive, arbitrary, suggestive, and generic.

A descriptive mark uses a specific feature or quality of a product to differentiate it from other products of its kind. Unlike those marks that are unique to a specific commodity, a descriptive mark is not distinctive and can not usually be trademarked unless it has taken a secondary identification and the customers begin associating it exclusively with the commodity.

Suggestive marks on the other hand indicate a particular feature of the product. However, the relationship between the name and the good is not obviously perceptible and it might need a little bit of imagination on the part of the customers to comprehend it. For example, footwear named ‘Hush Puppies’ are suggestive of comfortable shoes, which ensure that your feet do not become sore. The interesting part is that ‘barking dogs’ is a slang for sore feet in some regions, especially in America.

On the other hand, arbitrary marks are those that are not linked to the commodity. For instance, the use of trademark ‘Apple’ with a logo of a half bitten apple is not at all related to the computers marketed under the mark. Similarly, fanciful marks are those that come from the creative imagination of the manufacturer or come from archaic languages like Latin and Greek.

Lastly, generic marks are ones which represent a general category of products like ‘olive oil’ and are afforded no protection under the existing trademark laws.

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