How Trademarks Are Classified
Trademark safety is granted for terms, logos and images that identify products of one firm as distinct from others. The main objective of trademarks is to prevent any confusion in the consumers’ minds about the origin of an item that they plan to buy.
One of the key requirements for a trademark is that it must be distinctive, which means it should be exclusive and recognizable. The distinctiveness of a trademark can be determined by slotting it in one of the trademark classifications – suggestive, descriptive, generic and arbitrary.
A descriptive mark uses a particular characteristic or quality of a product to separate it from other commodities of its kind. Although some descriptive marks that have acquired a secondary meaning in the market, which the customers can recognize as coming from a particular manufacturer, can be trademarked, this is not the general case as descriptive marks are hardly ever unique.
Suggestive marks are pointers towards a particular product feature or quality. However, the relation between the name and the product is not obviously perceptible and it might require some amount of guess work on the part of the customers to comprehend it. For instance, the brand name known as ‘Hush Puppies’ points to a comfortable shoe range that protects your feet from becoming sore. The interesting part is that ‘barking dogs’ is a slang for sore feet in some places, especially in the US.
On the other hand, arbitrary marks are those that are in no way related to the commodity. For example, the usage of the mark ‘Apple’ for computers is entirely disconnected from the product it signifies. Likewise, there is no relationship between the fanciful name Exxon and the products sold under the name as the name is a fruit of the imagination of the marketing agents of the firm.
Finally, the category of generic marks clearly identifies the goods, like ‘camping gear’, and they cannot be granted any trademark protection due to lack of distinctiveness.
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