https://youtu.be/6cFVLWV0ZI4 This is part one of a 10 part series on Essential Benefits of Trademark Registration. This week, the topic is Avoiding a Busted Brand: Preventing the Pain of Forced Rebranding through Trademark Registration. I'll be talking about five painful problems that can happen for your business when you don't take the correct steps to develop your brand, and how to avoid those problems or get started in handling them. Imagine you've been using your business name, logo, or slogan for several years, building a good base of local customers. You make moves to expand your market, and suddenly you get a cease and desist letter from another business that has better rights to the trademark, or you go to file an application for federal registration, and the search to identify any possible problems uncovers an identical trademark for similar goods and or services, meaning there's no way you'll get your application approved. What was a time of exciting expansion has now become a horrorscape of being forced to rebrand. Rebranding is painful enough when you want to do it and plan for it. Being forced to do it quickly on someone else's timeline can be disastrous. Let's get into the top five painful issues involved with forced rebranding. 1. Financial Cost Rebranding can be a significant financial burden. Without even going into the possible loss of business that can come from rebranding, costs of rebranding include having new logos designed, having new marketing materials designed, updating signs, changing packaging, updating websites, and potentially launching marketing campaigns to reintroduce the brand to the market. That's a lot of expenses, and they can add up to tens of thousands of dollars. Even if you're just starting out or handle all those things yourself, that's going to cost you in terms of hours you won't be able to spend working on the core of your business, or extra hours at the expense of your personal time with your family and friends. 2. Loss of Brand Equity Rebranding means letting go of the brand equity that the previous brand had built over time. Your brand is what people associate with the service, quality, and trustworthiness of your business. Those things are crucial to a business, and they don't get associated with a brand overnight. It takes hard work and countless hours. Once the traits you want associated with your brand have been established, They create customer recognition, loyalty, trust in new offerings, and referrals from existing customers. It takes a while for that to rebuild when rebranding happens. Sometimes it works fairly quickly, like when Facebook renamed its parent company Meta, with Facebook remaining as the name of just the part of the company handling that social media service. Or when Kentucky Fried Chicken changed to KFC. But more often it takes a very long time, like when Netflix re branded its DVD by Mail Services as Quickster, which caused the company's stock to fall, and Netflix put the mail service back under the Netflix name. So that failed completely. Or when PricewaterhouseCoopers briefly changed its business consulting branch's name to Monday, which just confused people and had none of the connotations of experience and quality the original name had. Loss of Brand Equity Can Create Confusion Loss of brand equity can create confusion among consumers. A sudden and significant change in brand identity can confuse existing customers because they might not immediately recognize the new brand, leading to a temporary drop in customer engagement and sales, like what happened with Netflix. This confusion might also push consumers to competitors who still have a familiar brand. Loss of Brand Equity Is Loss of SEO and Online Presence Loss of brand equity is also loss of SEO and online presence. If your old brand had established an online presence, changing to a new brand can at least temporarily negatively impact search engine rankings, website traffic, and social media following. Keeping SEO phrases connected with the old brand may seem tempting, But that can still cause you to be accused of infringement by driving customers of the other brand with the superior rights to the trademark to your website behind the scenes. 3. Communication Challenges. Rebranding requires a lot of communication. You have to effectively communicate the reasons for the rebranding to customers. partners, and stakeholders like employees and shareholders. It's crucial to do that. Poor communication can lead to misunderstandings, negative perceptions, and a decrease in consumer trust, all of which can lead to decreased business. How much effort will you put into explaining the rebranding to these groups and convincing them they can expect the same quality and trustworthiness they associated with the old brand? How do you craft a message about that without admitting you're rebranding because there were infringement issues? Even if you ...
