Entrepreneurs: Avoid the Mistake of Trademarking Your Market Description

Know what to protect and what to share.

For consultants and entrepreneurs with marketing budget constraints, trademarking the name of a new market category may make it invisible and difficult to spread. Tip: share your market category names with your industry, rather than label them as proprietary.

An example of a market name is metaverse. Companies trademark and patent ideas that operate in the metaverse, yet the name is not protected as intellectual property (IP).

There are times when you benefit from a patent, copyright, or trademark of your work—products, company names, a unique process, among others. Yet when you create a new market category, consider the following scenario.

As a small business owner or solopreneur, you’ve come up with a new market category that doesn’t exist. You want to be the leader with this brilliant idea. Rather than share it with the world freely, you trademark the category phrase.

This will make your idea valuable, right?

When there is a trademark or registered trademark applied to a phrase, partners, competitors, and valuable members of your ecosystem are less likely to share your content.

When you hire PR or marketing agencies to help you sell your products within your category, they ask you, “who are your competitors?” You say, “well, there aren’t any – this is a new category.”

Yeah, right. That statement is usually not true. There are typically substitute products that solve a similar problem.

As you reach out to potential customers to sell your products or services, they are not familiar with your category. Trying out a new category is risky. That is why large companies who want to “own” a category, invest sizeable marketing dollars to build the market.

While owning a category can be a smart move, consultants and smaller entrepreneurs lack the resources to build a category in addition to making a market for their offerings.

 Here are three strategies for gaining acceptance of your category, while preserving your resources to market your company and products:

1️⃣ Create an Industry Hub, Not a Private Island

The problem with selfishly protecting your new category by trademarking a phrase that describes your market is you create an island rather than an ecosystem of partners, clients, communicators, and idea spreaders.

The consequence of protecting your market name is you may smother the traction for your idea and eventually your offerings.

Consider building a market and co-creating an industry with others who also have products that are relevant for your market. Chances are the evolution of your market space—where your products will be promoted and discussed—already exist in universities, industry associations, industry analysts, and online discussion hubs.

Examples of market names in the tech space that are NOT trademarked include names like blockchain, metaverse, or artificial intelligence. These markets are analyzed and supported by robust industries and associations.

It’s important to know what is worth protecting and what is worth sharing.

If Apple had trademarked the phrase smartphone for the iPhone, other mobile device makers may have confused the market with their competitive offerings. Enabling others to join the industry resulted in exponential growth for the category.

You might be thinking, what about protecting your intellectual property? Your advisers recommended you protect your IP.

2️⃣ Invest in IP protection for company and product names, rather than market categories

 Think about what you are trying to protect when you make it proprietary.

IP protection is a big deal on Shark Tank. Questions regarding patents dominate the conversations between the entrepreneur and the sharks. If your unique product does not have a patent, the sharks move away rather than swarm around you.

Yet you never hear them talk about trademarking names that describe your market space.

As a technology marketing executive making a market for securing mobile devices in the early 2000s, our company had limited resources to market the company and the products.

We came up with a few phrases for the category, yet it did not make sense with our limited resources to design and market the category.

We let the analysts and the markets define the category and chose not to trademark the category. With the goal of an eventual acquisition, the smart move was to register the trademark for the company name and focus on building value for the company.

So, how do companies with limited resources to build a category gain traction for it?

3️⃣ Dominate the Category; Invite Others to Participate

As a small business, you will gain traction for your idea in clever ways by embracing the idea of open source. By making your content freely available, others can build out the concept and help your customers better understand your offerings.

Ten years ago, when typing career agility in my browser, there were zero results.

I knew I wanted to build a business around this mindset.

Researching how to apply agile principles to careers, I focused on seeding the market with content. Sample activities included writing a book “Activate Your Agile Career,” creating a career agility definition, designing a career agility model, and crafting a foundation article on LinkedIn.

I coined the phrase as a new category within the career development space and created the first definition for this category. My definition has been in the #1 or #2 spot on Google for several years.

What is career agility?

"An agile career is a self-reflective, incremental career path, guided by response to change, evolving job roles, and designed to optimize creativity, growth, and happiness."

Similar to how Seth Godin promotes spreading great ideas in his book, Unleashing the Ideavirus, the burden is lightened when you encourage others to spread the word and expand the market.

As awareness for career agility expanded, I built offerings around it such as corporate training, workshops, and speaking.

Rather than trademark “career agility,” I focused my resources on my company name, Konstant Change™, my book, and the career agility model.

Summary

Create intellectual property guardrails where it makes sense and within your investment constraints. If you want to contribute to the market space description, share it generously with the industry participants to advance your business and category.

• Trademark company names and product names, slogans and logos.
• Protect your products, inventions, and processes, with patents.
• Copyright created work, original works of art, and literature.

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