getting your brand name wrong can cost you literally thousands if not it can cost you a lot of money hi my name is Jim Hardin the founding attorney here at Hawthorne law where we help online entrepreneurs to get their legal house in order so that you can build something that truly matters in the world today we're talking about coming up with an amazing name for that business there's a lot at stake when you're trying to come up with the right name for your business because if you get this wrong you can spend literally thousands of
dollars on marketing materials websites social media brand recognition all these things just to find out later on that you've either picked the wrong name or picked the name that somebody else is already using or picked a name that is not even capable of being trademarked so you want to get this right and today I want to talk to you about the five main categories of names that you can choose for your business what are the best ones what are the worst ones and how to pick the right sweetspot category that's gonna work for you so
that your business can be smooth sailin later on when it comes time to trademark the name of your brand and by the way this also applies to product offerings as well it's not just for brand names it's also for the products and services that you might be selling in your business so let's take a minute and talk about what a lot of people do when they're naming a business for their brand they basically just do a brainstorm come up with something that sounds good or maybe they have that light bulb moment where they decide you
know what this is a name that's gonna work for my business and I'm gonna go with it and they do and it normally doesn't work out quite so well so when it comes time and and if you missed my video last week you want to go make sure you check this video right here that talks about all the mistakes that people make when coming up with names for your online business but today what I want to talk about are the five best categories of names that you can use when thinking about how you want to
trademark your business because ultimately you do want to trademark your business this is one of the best investments you can make in your business especially if you're thinking that somewhere later on down the road you want to sell your business of course right now the guy outside decides he wants to do two more thing isn't been around all day now he comes out come on dude [Music] whenever somebody comes to me with a trademark idea I want to talk to them about the five main categories of trademarks so when you're coming up a name for
your trademark these five main categories I'm gonna go through them real quick and then we're gonna go through them one at a time in a little more detail so we've got fanciful arbitrary suggestive descriptive and generic those are the five categories of names let's talk about them each one at a time and then we'll talk about what are the best names and one of the worst names so let's talk about fanciful names first fanciful names are basically made-up names their names that were not in the dictionary before you came up with the name so if
you make something up that is a by definition a fanciful name some examples of this are gonna be Google Kodak Skype these are all fanciful names none of them existed before the companies created those names to name their business Zappos is another one that I would throw in there except Zappos comes from the Spanish word zapatos which means shoes so that's a little bit of gray area but I would call it fanciful here's the plusses to using fanciful names fanciful names are very easy to be trademarked but there's also some negatives that go with them
because when you make up a name nobody knows what that you're talking about and so you have to have a lot of money to put behind that brand to educate the public about what it is that you're actually selling so in general from a trademark perspective fanciful names are gonna be great but from a practical standpoint they're not so great because they take a lot of time of money to educate the public the second category of names are gonna be the arbitrary names and these are names that are already in existence but they're being used
in a way that is unrelated to their initial meeting meeting no no meaning being used in a way that is unrelated to their initial meaning got me some great examples of this are gonna be Apple and Amazon all of those are names that were in the dictionary before Apple decided to use Apple as their brand name or before Amazon decided to use these names they're being used in an a in a way that is completely unrelated to what the word was initially intended we all know what an Apple is but Apple is a computer company
and has nothing to do with selling apples Amazon I'm not sure Jeff Bezos came up with named Amazon I'm sure there's a story behind that that is clearly used in a way that is not what it was initially intended we're not talking about selling a rainforest we're talking about selling an online marketplace to sell books is what it started out with as so arbitrary names the pros and cons here are number one the pros from a trademark perspective again they're gonna be names that are fairly easy to trademark but the cons again just like with
the fanciful names you have to do a lot of education you kind of tell people what you're all about and that takes a lot of money and time and effort a lot of people aren't necessarily going to know what your business is about when you're just getting started from that standpoint again as a practical matter they're not necessarily gonna be the best names for a small online business that might be a solopreneur or something that you're doing with your spouse or a couple friends and building up an online business so suggestive names is the third
category names these are gonna be names that suggest a quality or characteristic of the goods or services that you are selling so great examples of this are gonna be greyhound FaceTime snapchat Wrangler these all kind of have these these Greyhound sounds like it's something that's gonna be fast so it's Greyhound bus fast bus Wrangler kind of gives you the sense of this you know cowboy style and that's kind of indicative of the genes that are being sold suggestive names are really good names for trademark purposes because again they're names that are that are previously in
the dictionary but they're they're being used in a different sort of way but at the same time they're being used in a way that kind of suggests what the good or service is all about when you're using a suggestive name you don't need to spend as much money there still needs to be some education involved but you don't need to spend as much money explaining to the public what the brand is all about I haven't talked about this a lot in the past pavón law is a suggestive name and the reason it's a suggestive name
is because a Hawthorn tree or Hawthorn bush was used back hundreds of years ago to protect property from thieves and predators and at Hawthorn we protect online businesses from people that would steal your brand other businesses people that might sue you the government taxes all these things were were trying to protect online businesses from all these predators that might come in and try and steal your property from that standpoint Hawthorne the name I've chosen in Hawthorne law is somewhat suggestive of the type of law practice that we're trying to build that's a pro tip so
these first three the fanciful the arbitrary and the suggestive those are kind of the above the bar terms they're going to be easiest to trademark if and when you decide you want to trademark your brand these next two categories are much more difficult to credit to trademark and actually the last category is incapable of trademark protection at all the fourth category is going to be called descriptive terms descriptive terms are terms that merely describe the product or service they might also use the owner's name or the geographic location where you do business so I've talked
about this in a past video if I were a law firm and I named my firm you know the Raleigh law firm or the Carey law firm because that's where my law firm is located in North Carolina that I can't trademark that it's just the description of the geographic location where we're located now that's not to say that these terms can't ever be trademarked they can if over time they acquire distinctiveness then at a certain point they can actually be trademarked however when you're just starting your business if your mark is merely descriptive and nothing
else then it is not going to be able to be trademarked your application will be denied there are some fairly famous examples of trademarks that are merely descriptive for example McDonald's was named after the McDonald's brothers who started the burger franchise but at the time that it was started it didn't have the distinctiveness that it has today American Airlines is merely descriptive of the fact that we've got an airline that exists in America Bank of America same thing using a descriptive term although you're not going to be able to trademark that term right off the
bat if you continue to work at and build your brand then over time you will be able to trademark that term but you got to work at it alright the last category is generic terms and these are terms that are not capable of being trademarked at all these are just basically the table store b1 the container I'm I wonder if they can do I need to look into this is The Container Store trademark well a second let's do some quick recon and see I might even put my glasses on for this I bet it is
it is fairly descriptive right I'm not sure how the container store got trademarked but it's probably because it's acquired distinctiveness over time and they're looking at it as a descriptive term but if you said the Apple Store and it's not a store that sells computers it's the store that sells apples you're not going to be able to trademark that term so if you're thinking about what type of name you want to use to trademark your business you definitely want to consider names that are above the bar so you want to look at probably the suggestive
terms more than anything else because words that are unrelated your business but do convey a meaning about what you do or what you sell in a positive way are gonna be the most memorable and powerful brand names for your business and those are the ones you really want to focus on when you're thinking about what type of name to use for your business or for the products or services that you sell so if you want to learn more about how to trademark your brand or the products or services you sell I've got another video right
here that's gonna give you an overview of the process and what you need to know and what you need to do if that's something that you want to do so check this video out and we'll see you next time
