Is Your Brand Prepared to Go Viral

Welcome to the Own Your Genius podcast where we empower entrepreneurs to use their education and their experiences to create dope businesses. I’m your host, Attorney LaConya Murray. I hear a lot of you are ready for us to put this “very demure, very mindful” trend behind us. However, Jools is counting on the revenue to help her pay for her transition and support her family. But she worries that not being able to register a trademark could prevent her from doing that. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you know that I don’t think that’s the case. Today I want to go a little further into why I don’t believe registering the trademark for “very demure, very mindful” is the key to dual success. But before we dive into today’s podcast, make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any insights into how to own your genius.

Welcome back to the Own Your Genius podcast where we discuss building businesses, growing brands and what else? Only your genius. I’m your host, Attorney LaConya Murray, owner of Off The Mark IP Solutions. Off the Mark is a boutique intellectual property firm representing innovative entrepreneurs aka geniuses who are looking to protect their brand and grow their business with ongoing legal support and business mentorship. We have a good one for you today, so let’s get started.

Last week, I got a lot of DMs, messages about the very demure, very mindful trademark and how Jools was having problems because someone else had beat her to the punch with registering it and she was heartbroken. She thought that, hey, this is how I’m going to make my money to do all the things that I wanted to do, but now I can’t sell this merchandise because someone’s registered the trademark. I talked about that. There’s a brief video on it on LinkedIn. You can look at it. But the main point of it. The main point that I made was that building brands on short-term trends is not very mindful, right? Trends come and go, but your brand could last forever. And that’s what you need to be focusing on. You need to be more focused and more intentional about building your brand. And let’s talk about why that is.

First of all, trademarks don’t protect short phrases unless it’s going to identify the source of a good or a service. So just because you came up with the viral phrase doesn’t mean that you automatically have this trademark protection. It has to be attached to a good or a service. And most of the time what people do is attach it to some type of merchandise, maybe apparel, maybe makeup or whatever, something of that nature. The important thing to know is just because you said it, like being the first person to utter this phrase, it doesn’t mean that you own the trademark or even a copyright on it for that matter depending on what it is. And, as we’re talking about merchandise and viral trends, taking that phrase and slapping it on a t-shirt or a mug or something doesn’t count either. Like you literally, it has to identify the source of a good or a service. When people see that phrase, they need to think of that good or service. That’s what we mean by identifying that good or service, like identifying the source, the person or the brand behind it.

That’s what we mean by identifying the source of a good or service. The other thing you should consider when you’re, when you’re wanting to build a brand on a trend is that the trademark protection is limited to how you use it. Meaning that once you register this trademark, you will not have the authority to prevent everybody everywhere from saying it. Keep that in mind. A lot of times they get calls and that’s what they think they’re going to do, but they can’t, so this means that people can continue using this phrase while you’re trying to build this brand. And people, again, won’t associate the phrase with your brand. Which brings me to this big point, my overall point, with why we don’t want to build brands on viral trends. Viral trends happen because these phrases, they generate broadly with a group of people or with several groups of people, which makes them less distinctive. This broad appeal can make it more difficult for consumers to associate that phrase specifically for whatever good or service that you’re offering. And as these phrases are adapted by all these people, that makes them lose their uniqueness. And if multiple brands are having the same thought, hey, this trend is popular, let’s hop on it, right? Let’s do something, let’s build this brand around this trend, then it’s going to make it very difficult for any one of those brands to stand out.

And that’s why the USPTO can actually deny your application. Like they literally have a refusal that’s based on failure to function. Because if it doesn’t do what? That’s right, identify the source of a good or a service, it does not function as a trademark. The widespread use of the term or the phrase may be enough to render it incapable of functioning as a trademark in the perception of the public. And that’s regardless of the marks attended message or its relation to the goods, meaning that even if you are using that trademark in the right way, meaning that if you have apparel, you’re using the mark in the tag or as an online store name or whatever, you can still be denied. LeBron James, for example, his Taco Tuesday application for the name of a podcast was denied. Why? Because Taco Tuesday, it’s Taco Tuesday. Like who doesn’t know about Taco Tuesday? We all know about Taco Tuesday. And USPTO was essentially like, hey, you know what? Taco Tuesday, no one really thinks about Taco Tuesday as it relates to the podcast. We’re just going to go ahead and deny this application.

That’s why I say that focus on building your brand. Instead of worrying about short-term gains, I want you to focus on long-term success. You don’t have to wait until you go viral to do things like document processes for things like customer support and shipping and disputes. Do that now, do this. If you’re, especially if you’re just starting out, use this time to build the foundation of your brand so that when you do go viral, your business can support it. Because that’s another thing that happens too. People go viral and they do send people to the website and then they can’t handle it. Don’t think that you have to be in business for a certain amount of time or have a certain amount of revenue in order to start documenting your processes. We use both written processes and recording. We use video as well. And don’t think that if me taking five minutes to document this process is going to like put a damper in my day and maybe it will because it does take a little time but once you do it like you will be able to delegate that task to someone else.

Now, it’s off your plate and things that I love about it is that if there are any questions about something you can refer them to the SOP Or they will automatically know to go there rather than to come to you. Document your processes to make sure that when you do go viral, you can support things when people want to know about shipping and they want to know about refunds and all this stuff. You already have it down. The other thing I would say, if we’re talking about focusing on long-term success and being ready in case your brand goes viral, is make it easy for people to pay you. Can we do that? Can we make it easy for people to pay you? Meaning that, what’s the point of going viral just for viral sake? If the media wants to contact you, will their email get lost in a sea of all of the spam emails because you don’t have a specific folder for those emails to go to or a process for it to be handled? Those are things like that. If somebody wants to buy from you, where would you send them? Is this everyone that has to DM you and you have to send them some sort of cash app link and things of that nature? No, like I know websites get a bad rap because they can be time consuming and they can be expensive to build. But they are necessary. Plus, the improvement in technology makes it a lot easier to create this website, at least the first version of it, until you have the money you want to have it built the way you really want it to look. But having that website, you don’t own social media. I know you hear this all the time. You don’t own Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and all those things. If they decide to shut you down, they will shut you down. If they decide that ‘Hey, we’re just going to not show your post to everyone that is following,’ when sit there, if you want to see you, they can do that. And you can’t track the analytics from that. If you send them to your website, you can know who’s come to your website, you can know that demographic of people come to your website, you can know all these different things and you can cater to that.

Get a website, make it easy for people to work with you. Make sure you have some sort of fraud detection and anything that you do when you’re building your business. Because scammers, they be scamming. They are still out here scamming. We use things like the two-factor, the two-step verification, strong passwords. I know it’s irritating to come up with these random numbers and letters and symbols, but strong passwords. And then train your staff that they shouldn’t be clicking on links and random emails. They need to verify the sender of the emails because again scammers be scammed. They will spoof an email that makes it seem like it’s coming from Facebook or Instagram or somewhere. But if you actually look at the sender, you’ll see it says something like gmail.com. That’s not a real email. Don’t click that link. Things of that nature. And then also on your website to make sure to keep the hackers at bay, you can use recapture. Recapture. Did I say that right? Something like that. But anyway, it just makes sure that the person is actually human before they can log into your site and make purchases because you don’t want to have to deal with credit card fraud or anything like that because people were able to hack into your site and purchase stuff for selling information.

Going viral on social media is not the goal. Profiting from going viral is the goal. And while it’s tempting to take that short-term approach of building your brand on a viral fad, the impact of viral phrases is often short-lived. Once that trend fades, your brand might struggle to maintain the same level of engagement and recognition. Geniuses, thank you for tuning in. What is your takeaway from this week’s episode? If you found it insightful, do me a favor and don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review.

Let’s take this conversation over to the Markedlegal Community. I want you to share this episode with three people and have them meet you there. But you know what to do before you go. Make sure you hit that subscribe button and rate the podcast. Until next week, I want you to keep building your business, growing your brand, and owning your genius.