Branding and trademarks: practice. Full electronic version of the book - for free, on the project website
Hello.
Before I started working at Alfa-Bank, for about ten years I developed websites, advertising campaigns and corporate identity for projects and companies. I described the accumulated experience on trademarks and branding in a book that in 2013 was published by the publishing house Mann, Ivanov and Ferber.
My colleague and I put the book in the form of a website - completely free of charge. I invite you to read.
')
And here I will briefly explain why trademarks are important for start-ups, young companies, and why businessmen, productologists and developers need to have an idea about this side of the matter.
Sometimes the squiggle in the logo can cost months of downtime in the development of the company, and sometimes an error with the name can cost all the investments in advertising (and these investments could be made over the years - and all for nothing).
At least 5-7 times a year, customers and partners (from different companies) called and asked for advice - either how to get out of a complex collision with domain names, or with unhealthy competition issues - when dodgers falsified the design of someone else's business, or - the most common case - when the name of a company or project turned out to be occupied by a completely different company, and it is quite legitimate for itself.
All these points are important when expanding a business or selling it:
when expanding, when in the form of an intangible asset, the developments in visual communications are transmitted and franchises are created;
when selling - most often it is the brand that is sold (formalized as a registered trademark) and the client base (especially in the IT field, we are not talking about production and factories).
If there is no registered trademark - it all turns out to be much more difficult.
Problems with corporate styles could be classified as follows (arbitrary order, without priority):
- Poorly made graphics
- Name cannot be registered
- Problems with domain names (the sign can be registered, and the sonorous domain name is legally used by other guys)
- Legal issues
“Problems with registration: the elements of the mark / logo are already used in the right class of the Nice Classification ( see Wikipedia ) - and you have to redo the mark or logo
- Problems with the production of souvenirs, printing (sometimes it is still relevant - for conferences and gifts, well, for all types of offline advertising) and the most interesting is difficult to adapt for advertising on the Internet
- The invented sign may already be occupied by someone else! Especially simple icons and, let's say, industry, describing the scope of the company as a whole.
- Invented sign can not be registered in principle. This usually applies to commonly used images and words. For example, the image of the earth ball (with recognizable geographic details) cannot be registered, but they try to do this often. and, by the way, there are quite serious companies that seriously work with such graphics (for years!). Once, it was time for such a company to come up with a way out of a delicate situation - they couldn’t pass on their advertising just by franchise.
Terribly common topic. Startup comes up with a cool name. And a domain in some fashionable zone, such as .io or .cc - because the name is abstract, from some word, and of course, in the main zones it was taken a hundred years ago. And then it turns out that this name was registered quite a real company about 15 years ago, and for two of the three necessary classes. The start-up has already come up with the logo, and the project has started a project, and now it is ready to sell it to one large technology company, which has decided to expand its product portfolio. At this point, he learns that selling it all will be more difficult than we would like, and without a legally protected brand the cost of the project will be less.
In general, coming up with a name is a big headache. About this there is a separate chapter in the book - how to relieve this headache and, if possible, even cure it.
It is also interesting to check the names not only on the official bases, but also on the Internet. Especially on foreign sites, if you plan to service not only on the Russian market to bring (and this is important for software, for example). The name may be someone already taken. Or it will be bad to be because of the big flood with such a word. Or the context of using this word will be unpleasant :-)
Two years have passed since the book’s release, the paper circulation has already been bought and the second one is not expected yet (I’m going to appreciate the paper book lovers - I have a few more copies left, I can give it with a strong desire).
Therefore, we have taken and published the book in the form of a site.
We also introduced Orphus: a few typos sneaked into the print edition, and something could go wrong when porting to the web version. We are looking forward to your participation: if you notice a glitch or a typo wherever, let me know.
We will make a version in the epub in a couple of months - when we choose typos or realize that no one reports (there are really very few of them, but we need to make sure).
Before I started working at Alfa-Bank, for about ten years I developed websites, advertising campaigns and corporate identity for projects and companies. I described the accumulated experience on trademarks and branding in a book that in 2013 was published by the publishing house Mann, Ivanov and Ferber.
My colleague and I put the book in the form of a website - completely free of charge. I invite you to read.
')
And here I will briefly explain why trademarks are important for start-ups, young companies, and why businessmen, productologists and developers need to have an idea about this side of the matter.
Sometimes the squiggle in the logo can cost months of downtime in the development of the company, and sometimes an error with the name can cost all the investments in advertising (and these investments could be made over the years - and all for nothing).
At least 5-7 times a year, customers and partners (from different companies) called and asked for advice - either how to get out of a complex collision with domain names, or with unhealthy competition issues - when dodgers falsified the design of someone else's business, or - the most common case - when the name of a company or project turned out to be occupied by a completely different company, and it is quite legitimate for itself.
All these points are important when expanding a business or selling it:
when expanding, when in the form of an intangible asset, the developments in visual communications are transmitted and franchises are created;
when selling - most often it is the brand that is sold (formalized as a registered trademark) and the client base (especially in the IT field, we are not talking about production and factories).
If there is no registered trademark - it all turns out to be much more difficult.
Problems with corporate styles could be classified as follows (arbitrary order, without priority):
- Poorly made graphics
- Name cannot be registered
- Problems with domain names (the sign can be registered, and the sonorous domain name is legally used by other guys)
- Legal issues
What affects poorly made graphics
“Problems with registration: the elements of the mark / logo are already used in the right class of the Nice Classification ( see Wikipedia ) - and you have to redo the mark or logo
- Problems with the production of souvenirs, printing (sometimes it is still relevant - for conferences and gifts, well, for all types of offline advertising) and the most interesting is difficult to adapt for advertising on the Internet
- The invented sign may already be occupied by someone else! Especially simple icons and, let's say, industry, describing the scope of the company as a whole.
- Invented sign can not be registered in principle. This usually applies to commonly used images and words. For example, the image of the earth ball (with recognizable geographic details) cannot be registered, but they try to do this often. and, by the way, there are quite serious companies that seriously work with such graphics (for years!). Once, it was time for such a company to come up with a way out of a delicate situation - they couldn’t pass on their advertising just by franchise.
Situations when the name cannot be registered
Terribly common topic. Startup comes up with a cool name. And a domain in some fashionable zone, such as .io or .cc - because the name is abstract, from some word, and of course, in the main zones it was taken a hundred years ago. And then it turns out that this name was registered quite a real company about 15 years ago, and for two of the three necessary classes. The start-up has already come up with the logo, and the project has started a project, and now it is ready to sell it to one large technology company, which has decided to expand its product portfolio. At this point, he learns that selling it all will be more difficult than we would like, and without a legally protected brand the cost of the project will be less.
In general, coming up with a name is a big headache. About this there is a separate chapter in the book - how to relieve this headache and, if possible, even cure it.
It is also interesting to check the names not only on the official bases, but also on the Internet. Especially on foreign sites, if you plan to service not only on the Russian market to bring (and this is important for software, for example). The name may be someone already taken. Or it will be bad to be because of the big flood with such a word. Or the context of using this word will be unpleasant :-)
About the book: free electronic edition
Two years have passed since the book’s release, the paper circulation has already been bought and the second one is not expected yet (I’m going to appreciate the paper book lovers - I have a few more copies left, I can give it with a strong desire).
Therefore, we have taken and published the book in the form of a site.
We also introduced Orphus: a few typos sneaked into the print edition, and something could go wrong when porting to the web version. We are looking forward to your participation: if you notice a glitch or a typo wherever, let me know.
We will make a version in the epub in a couple of months - when we choose typos or realize that no one reports (there are really very few of them, but we need to make sure).
Links to chapters
- The preface is about the difference between trademarks and brands, more details about the process of working on
- The composition of the creative (working) group (who does what, why, how it affects the cost of work)
- Interviews with key employees of the company (this is to better talk about the company and interesting texts were obtained)
- Research of information materials of competitors (not to copy other people's work and to use the best practices)
- Formulation of tasks and conclusion of a contract (underwater rake, what to look for)
- Preparing drafts of informational texts (technical chapter on word processing; I decided to include in the book because this process eats up precious time, but there are things that are useful for those who want to do everything on their own)
- Formulation and formalization of basic services (sometimes service descriptions are lame, and need to be corrected; sometimes they need to be described in order to understand what type of trademark to register and by what classes; finally, sometimes services affect the design system — specific icons are invented, etc. )
- The search for names for the future trademark - everything is clear here: how they come up with names, what to look for and a few specific techniques
- Visualization of the idea: the development of signs and logos to prepare for the registration of a trademark - about the difference between the sign and the logo (not to be confused about the concepts of "trademark" and "brand" - it was higher about it), about the form and approaches to visualization
- Registration of a trademark - briefly describes the registration procedure, international and Russian options, the sequence and options for speed. Steps right by numbers.
- Registration of domain names and the creation of email addresses must also be taken into account. Among clients, people are quite different, there was a sense to tell: and about the influence of search engines, and about squatters, and about mail in the context of corporate identity.
- Elaboration of informational texts taking into account the developed nomenclature - nomenclature = names. Here, about how to collect a set of texts, organize them, how to write the rules for using names. Useful technical chapter
- Determination of production volumes and search for printing houses - mainly about printing.
- Effective management of graphic assets - about funny losses when using different versions of the graphic kit (sign + logo), how and what to give to contractors.
- Elaboration of distributions of the mark and logo for different conditions of use - an interesting chapter about optical correction and counting the number of modifications of the same icon
- Branded typography - popular about choosing a corporate font for a company or about ordering a new one. Pros and cons, what to look for, what criteria to use.
- Creating layouts (graphic design) - what does the designer do when the proprietary graphics are ready
- Afterword - thanks and closing remarks, everything is clear here :-)
- References (books) on branding, design and trademarks
- An approximate schedule of works on the creation of a trademark is a picture in which all the chapters are arranged and laid out on a calendar plan: you can see which works intersect, where what depends on what and in principle the sequence of actions depends, if you do an abstract project completely from scratch
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/291092/
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