Making Your Mark
By Claire L. Wudowsky
I received an email a few days ago about developing a domain name acquisition strategy. The author indicated that I should choose a word that describes my business or product and then register this word and all its misspellings. This procedure is fine if a company wants a domain name that's merely an online address; however, the method is quite shortsighted if a company also wants its domain name to be its identifying trademark or brand name. Dot-com companies, like their brick and mortar counterparts, must plan for the long term if their businesses are to thrive and prosper. Adopting and maintaining strong trademarks or brand names should be part of this long-term plan.
Trademarks Defined
A trademark is a "word, name, symbol, device, or any combination thereof" adopted by a company to distinguish its goods or services from those of others (see the amended Lanham Trademark Act of 1946). Further, trademarks indicate the source of the trademark owner's goods or services. Trademarks and service marks are forms of shorthand that let people easily find a company's products or services. When people go to the supermarket, they search the shelves for Coca-Cola. They don't look for that brown, cola-flavored, carbonated soft drink produced by that beverage company in Atlanta. A service mark is used in much the same way to identify and distinguish one company's services from another's. (I'll use the words "trademarks" or "marks" to refer to both trademarks and service marks.)
