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Check This Before You Print the Slogan

July 15, 20262 min readlegal

A tagline being original doesn't mean it's available. What to search before you put a line on signage, and where the real risk sits for a small business.

Writing an original line and owning an available line are different achievements. You can arrive at something nobody handed you and still find that a company two states over registered a near-identical phrase in your exact category four years ago.

The searching is cheap. Do it before the money gets spent, not after.

Search the obvious places first

1. Exact phrase in quotes, on a search engine. Ninety percent of collisions surface here in under a minute.
2. Your national trademark register. In the US that is the USPTO's public search; most countries have an equivalent free lookup.
3. Domain and social handles, even if you do not want them. An active company already using the phrase is the signal, not the domain itself.
4. Your own category, deliberately. Trademark conflicts are judged partly on whether customers would confuse the two businesses, so a match inside your industry matters far more than a match outside it.

Understand what actually creates risk

The test that matters is not "is this identical?" but "would a customer confuse these two?" That means similar-sounding lines in the same category can be a problem while identical lines in unrelated categories often are not.

Two consequences worth internalising. A phrase already registered by a company in a completely different field is frequently fine. And a phrase that merely sounds like a competitor's, in your field, can be a problem even though no words match.

Know that most slogans are weak marks

Purely descriptive taglines are hard to register and hard to defend, because you cannot easily stop other people describing what they do accurately. "Fast Plumbing Services" is nearly unprotectable.

Distinctive, slightly odd lines are both easier to protect and better at their actual job. The commercial argument and the legal argument point the same direction here, which is unusual and worth taking advantage of.

The first two are distinctive enough to be worth registering. The third is a description of a plumbing company, which is to say it is not really a mark at all.

Scale the effort to the exposure

• A campaign line running six weeks on social: a search-engine check is proportionate.
• A permanent tagline in the logo lockup: register search, then a professional clearance search.
• Anything going on physical goods, vehicles or signage: talk to an attorney first. The reprint cost dwarfs the consultation.

Keep a record of what you searched

Save the date, the terms and the results. If a dispute ever arrives, the difference between a documented good-faith search and no evidence at all can affect both how the conversation goes and what it costs.

It takes about five minutes to write down. Like most of this checklist, it is only annoying in the version where you skipped it.