It’s really hard for me to think of a situation where a business would have too many trademarks. I’ve worked with many clients over the years who have significant portfolios of several dozen or more trademark registrations. Generally, that’s because they have product lines with different product names and a creative name and a trademark registration to go with each of the names in that product line.
When a business has multiple trademarks, multiple trademark registrations, we call that a portfolio of marks. So for example, our law firm has a portfolio. We have a logo, we have a brand name, we have a name for the newsletter, a name for our free online monitoring tool. Each of those is one trademark. Together, they’re a portfolio.
The only time that I would hesitate that maybe a business could have too many trademarks would be if there’s somehow diluting their brand by just coming up with new names, new logos. Unnecessarily that would lead to consumers being confused about the nature of their brand or why there are so many different variations.
So from a marketing perspective, I could see that at some point you might have too many brands or too many names within your business, depending on the type of business. At that point you might say, “Why do we have so many trademarks?”
I would say it’s very difficult to have too many trademarks, but you should always evaluate why do we have these different brand names? Are they accomplishing the goals that we want them to? And then are they properly protected?
