Almost every business has a trademark or “trading as” name which customers (hopefully) remember when making buying decisions. You may have come up with a great new catch phrase or logo to describe a specialized product or service your business provides and you may want to use that phrase or logo in all of your advertisements. You’d like to use it without worrying that your competitors will steal it. You may think that simply copyrighting the ad or putting “™” next to the phrase or logo is all you need to do. You are almost right.

Your phrase or logo can be a trademark or a brand. Trademarks and Service Marks (both known as “marks”) serve to preserve and focus good will in the market place and so are used by manufacturers, merchants and service providers to distinguish their goods and services from others in that market place. If trademarks are used improperly, rights can be lost forever.

By following some basic rules for using trademarks, however, your rights in the trademark can be maintained and that trademark can be an important and long-lasting part of the equity in your business. Use our seven tips as a good start:

I) First, always use your trademark as an adjective, not as a noun. A trademark is most properly an adjective which modifies a generic noun term. For example, if you are selling coffee under the trademark “Steamy Joe,” then when referring to the product, do not write “Buy Steamy Joe,” instead write, “Buy Steamy Joe Coffee,” where “Coffee” is the generic noun term. The reason is that “Steamy Joe” should never become a generic name for coffee. Having your mark become a generic descriptor of a product or service is damaging to the mark’s ability to distinguish your goods from those of your competitors. Famous marks have been lost in this way. For example, the Bayer Chemical Company used to own the trademark “Aspirin” to describe salycitic acid-based analgesic compounds for pain relief. By not protecting the mark from becoming generic, Bayer lost rights in a valuable trademark. The lost value of that mark is almost incalculable, and since trademark rights can be renewed periodically, Bayer’s trademark rights in “Aspirin” could have lasted forever, much longer than their patents on the analgesic compound.

II) Trademarks should never appear in the plural; for example, it is incorrect to say “Buy two Steamy Joe’s and get one free”; instead, a more proper use would be “Buy two cups of Steamy Joe Coffee and get one free.”

III) Further, trademarks should never appear in possessive form; for example, it is incorrect to say “Steamy Joe’s flavor can’t be beat.” An easy test for proper use is whether one can remove a trademark from a sentence and have a complete sentence remain; if so, the trademark is more likely to have been used correctly. Following these guidelines will help prevent the trademark from becoming generic. Once a trademark does become a generic descriptor of goods or services, the trademark owner no longer has exclusive rights to use the mark, and it falls into the public domain just as “Aspirin” has done.

IV) Another way to make sure that the public knows you are preserving rights in a trademark is use of the ™ and ® symbol. These symbols are commonly used to alert the public that a word, mark or logo is being used as a trademark. The symbol ® should only be