Ep. 042 - Trademarks, IP and Customer Experience

Welcome to Keep Smiling, the e-commerce customer experience podcast. Hello everyone and thank you for being here. My name is Ty Walters, host of the show and owner of Seller Smile, your customer service team since 2017. Today we're discussing trademarks, intellectual property, and customer experience.

Normally you'd think of trademarks as protecting against counterfeits and other bad actors. But in this case, I'd like to demonstrate how actually owning and demonstrating, in some cases, your trademarks can actually change and enhance the customer experience depending on where your customers are finding you. So before we get into all of that, big disclaimer, this is not legal advice. Please seek an attorney specializing in intellectual property for the best advice for your situation.

I've gone through the process of filing once for a trademark, once for a service mark through the USPTO. and so I have my own experiences but each use case is different and this process is very important and getting it right at the beginning can be essential for your business. So please seek the guidance if you determine it's necessary. I personally did not seek the guidance.

I self-studied a lot of the material to understand what the process was and for my use case it was appropriate where I proceeded alone and was successful and that might be your use case as well. But whatever it might be, take my, what I have to say today is entertainment, me sharing my personal experience here. Okay. So if you're just joining us at this episode, we spent the last three talking about email.

In episode 39, five best practices for your customer service email address. In 40, an introduction to email authentication. And then in 41, I demonstrated setting those email authentication records, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. And we're departing from email.

We're going to take a break from that. Today, we're talking about mainly trademarks as they apply in the e-commerce world. When we're selling physical products, that's a trademark. And if you have other experiences or sometimes patents apply, we're not going to really be touching that in this episode.

If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can get in contact email us at keepsmilingatsellersmile.com and like always we'll have a challenge to action at the end related to the content in this episode whether you have a trademark or not or maybe you're not even started in the process we'll have something for you to take action to make sure that you're taking that step forward so with all of that introduction out of the way let start the five minute clock and spend the next five minutes talking about trademarks and customer experience So the first place to start is the website of the United States Patent and Trademark Office or USPTO.

This is the authority when it comes to all things trademarks and intellectual property. And it might be different for your country. I would like to focus in right on the menu here, we have trademarks. And if we scroll down trademark basics, this contains a wealth of information, but I'd like to focus in on the beginning here.

What is a trademark? And according to their site, they say a trademark can be any word, phrase, symbol, design, or combination of these things that identifies your goods or services. It's how customers recognize you in the marketplace and distinguish you from your competitors. The biggest things here, it identifies the source of your goods and services, provides legal protection for your brand, and helps guard against counterfeiting and fraud.

These are the normal things that we associate with patents and trademarks and things. It's like protection against the bad actors and the copycats out there. But we're going to extend that a little bit further to get us thinking about how this can be used as a tool to affect our customers. So with that out of the way, here's an example of the trademark that I filed back maybe five or six years ago.

It's called Glamboo, a mix of glamorous bamboo. And the intention was to have this line products, compostable dinnerware and kitchen essentials. We don't sell this anymore. So you're free to steal this trademark as it expires.

But as you can see, it was printed on the bottom and just a very basic font and it was sold. We sold through all of them. And the main demonstration at that time was for me to gain access into some of the enhanced tools in the marketplaces that I was selling in and we'll cover those next. And that experiment was successful for the most part.

And I learned a lot. So this is, It's really as simple as that. It's starting to use the mark in commerce. And from my understanding, that's when a lot of these protections are afforded to you.

When you have evidence of you selling under a brand name, under a design. And then later when you register that, you can enhance those protections. And after the registration process, this is what it looks like. This is a screenshot from their site of the Glamboo trademark after it was published.

And a lot of information here publicly. U.S. serial number, the status of it, when it was registered, things of that nature.

This is a great resource as a kind of like a proactive step. Once you've established selling as a brand, there are so many other people starting businesses the next year and years after that, and they aren't all going to do their comprehensive research. So being able to be found here will prevent future businesses from trying to start a name that is similar or like yours enough to cause confusion with their customers. This is one way to really start proactively addressing that So on their site they have this long list of why to register the trademark a lot of benefits that are offered by it Again you don have to register it It your choice You're still protected as long as you're using it and you have proof of that.

But why not? There's so much extra here. And one of the things is using the little R symbol next to your products. That means it's not only a trademark, but it's registered.

It's maybe just a symbol that the I's are dotted and T's are crossed, okay? So go to the USPTO.gov to learn more on that one. I'd like to focus the rest of the time on e-commerce and specifically Amazon Brand Registry.

This is the most exciting platform when it comes to IP and they really want to improve customer experience. So I'm going to launch their website here and just share it for a minute. We'll browse together. And if you haven't checked this out, it's really interesting.

Amazon Brand Registry allows a lot of protections and automatic protections. But in addition to that, They offer these like enhanced tools and capabilities. So if you scroll down here, we can see more brand building programs. Once you're registered and you have your trademark in their system, you have access to all these things that I would say other sellers don't.

And look at all these that have like customer facing entities, A plus content and stores, being able to display different type of really good content on these pages that your customers are visiting. We have customer engagement, email marketing, product videos, live demos of your products. There's a lot of really interesting things where your customers can see you and your brand so much better. So check this out.

I think it's underutilized and under known as a resource. So that's A plus content, stores, customer engagement, video shopping, Amazon Live. We'll have links to all of that in resources. Next is the Walmart brand portal.

It says here, Just ran out of time. And so we have one more slide to go. I'd like to show you eBay's verified rights owner program or what they call Vero. It says, we created the verified rights owner program so that intellectual property owners could report listings or products that infringe on their intellectual property rights.

It is in eBay's interest to ensure that infringing items are removed from the site as they are illegal and erode the trust of our buyers. So I included some links here to describe more of that if it interesting to you And this looks like the page where you actually file a rights violation if you would suspect one So they offer a form and different ways to get into contact with eBay Okay, so that brings us to the end here of episode 42 and the challenge to action. I'd like you to explore or start the IP trademark process.

This is if you're in the beginning stages of you're already using a brand or perhaps you're thinking about launching a brand. We used the SellerSmile brand for about six years before registering for the trademark, and we luckily were awarded it. But there's no reason that we should have waited that long. So start that process.

And the earlier you start, the more you learn. I think it's going to contribute to actually taking action on submitting the registration and winning that registration. And so you can start using it and benefiting, especially if you're on Amazon, from those brand registry enhanced tools. So I would urge you to visit this resources site.

There's videos, stats, and data, so much to guide you. And you could spend days here teaching yourself. An extra challenge. For those of you with a trademark already, I would like you to consider sharing the origin story of your trademark, your patent, your intellectual property with your customers.

That could be on social media, on your website. I see a lot of about pages on Shopify stores. and they maybe describe the founders, but it would be a nice maybe blog post or maybe a paragraph to say how the brand name came about, especially if you have an interesting origin story or background behind that. That's it for episode 42.

I hope this little discussion about trademarks and intellectual property has got your mind stirring about how it can be used as a resource, a tool to gain leverage for your customer experience, especially if you're an Amazon seller. Outside of that, registering your trademark is a great defensive measure. If you ever sense that there are infringers or fraud cases or counterfeiters out there, as you launch and grow your brand, visibility is going to rise and there's bad actors looking for easy wins and proven successes.

And if that becomes you, you may become a target. So having your intellectual property is a great way to extend the life of your business despite whatever it may encounter. That's all I have for you today. So thank you so much.

And as always, you can go to sellersmile.com slash podcast to see all of these episodes. For this one in particular, to see those details, go to slash 042 and you'll be taken directly to this page. Thank you so much.

And we will see you in episode 43. Bye.