Daily Junction.mobi portalBusiness · March 18, 2025 · Liam Chen · 5 min
A plain-English guide to trademarks: what they protect, how registering with the UK Intellectual Property Office works, the symbols, and how a trademark fits into protecting your brand.
You can spend years building a brand — a name customers trust, a logo they recognise, a reputation they value — and lose a chunk of it overnight if someone else starts trading under something confusingly similar. A trademark is the legal tool that stops that from happening. For any business with a name worth protecting, understanding trademarks is not a luxury; it is part of looking after an asset you have worked hard to create.
This is general information, not legal advice. Intellectual property rules and fees change, so confirm the current position on GOV.UK or with a qualified attorney before acting.
A trademark protects the signs that identify your brand and distinguish your goods or services from everyone else's. In practice that usually means your brand name, logo or slogan, though trademarks can also cover shapes, sounds, colours and other distinctive markers. The essential idea is distinctiveness: a trademark is something that lets customers know a product or service comes from you.
That is also why purely descriptive terms are hard to protect. You cannot trademark "Fresh Bread" for a bakery, because every baker needs those words. But an invented or distinctive name applied to bread can be protected, because it points to a single source rather than describing the product itself.
A brand is one of a business's most valuable assets, and a trademark is what turns reputation into a defensible legal right. Registering gives you:
This sits alongside the other ways businesses guard what they create. Trademarks are one part of a wider toolkit; our guide on how to protect a business idea covers how trademarks fit with confidentiality, copyright and other protections, because a brand name is rarely the only thing worth defending.
You get some protection automatically just by trading under a name, through a common-law action called passing off. But relying on it is a weak position: you have to prove you had built up reputation in the name, that the other party misrepresented their goods as yours, and that you suffered damage. That is slow, expensive and uncertain.
Registration is far stronger. A registered trademark is a clear, provable, public right — you can point to the register rather than reconstruct a reputation in court. For most serious businesses, registering the core brand is well worth the cost and effort precisely because it makes enforcement straightforward instead of fraught.
In the UK, trademarks are registered through the Intellectual Property Office (IPO). The process, in outline:
Getting the classes right matters more than people expect. Protection only covers the classes you register, so think about where your business is heading, not just where it is today.
The two symbols are not interchangeable, and the difference is legal, not stylistic:
| Symbol | Meaning | Who can use it |
|---|---|---|
| ™ | Claims a trademark | Anyone asserting a mark, registered or not |
| ® | Registered trademark | Only owners of a registered mark |
Using the ® symbol on a mark that is not registered is an offence, so never apply it until your registration is confirmed. The ™ symbol is a softer claim you can use to put others on notice that you regard a name or logo as yours, even before registration.
A registered UK trademark lasts ten years and can be renewed indefinitely in further ten-year periods — which is why some of the world's oldest brands still hold live marks. But protection is not entirely passive. You must:
Securing your brand identity is one of the foundational steps when starting a business in the UK, alongside choosing a structure and getting your finances in order. Doing the trademark search early can also save you from building a brand around a name you cannot actually own.
Trademark rights are territorial. A UK registration protects you in the UK; if you trade or plan to trade abroad, you may need protection in other countries, which can be approached through international systems. Likewise, registering a company name at Companies House or buying a domain does not give you trademark rights — they are separate things, and a registered company name can still infringe someone else's mark.
A trademark turns the brand you have built into a legal asset you can defend, license and pass on. It protects the signs that say "this comes from us" — usually your name, logo or slogan — and registration with the IPO gives you far stronger, clearer rights than relying on passing off. Search before you apply, register in the classes that matter, use the ® symbol only once you are registered, and keep the mark in use and renewed. For any business with a name worth protecting, it is one of the soundest investments you can make.
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