Trademark protection is granted for words, logos and images that identify goods of one company as different from others. The basic purpose of trademarks is to make sure that consumers can buy the correct products without being confused with spurious or counterfeited ones.
A trademark must be exclusive and remarkably distinct for the customers to identify it easily even amongst a crowd of similar products in the market. The distinctiveness of a trademark can be assessed by placing it in one of the trademark classifications - suggestive, descriptive, generic and arbitrary.
A descriptive mark is one that provides description of a commodity with respect to its quality or features like smell, functionality, dimensions etc. However, descriptive marks are not as distinctive as some other marks and therefore, they are not usually eligible to be trademarked. Although, if the mark has attained a secondary meaning that is more well known among the customers, it can be successfully trademarked.
Suggestive marks, as the name indicates, suggest a characteristic of the product. However, consumers might have to use their imagination to identify the real link between the commodity and the mark as there is no evident link between the two. For instance, the brand name known as 'Hush Puppies' points to a comfortable shoe range that makes sure that your feet do not become sore. The basic reason behind such a name is that the problem of sore feet is known as 'barking dogs' in certain American states.
Arbitrary marks on the contrary have no relationship whatsoever with the nature or quality of the product. For example, the use of trademark 'Apple' with a logo of a half eaten apple is not at all linked to the computers marketed under the mark. Fanciful marks are those marks that do not have any usage in existing languages and are the outcome of the imagination of the producer, like 'Exxon'.
Lastly generic marks are those that describe a general category of the product like 'olive oil', and they do not come under the purview of trademark laws.
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