The following is an edited transcript of my video The Golden Ratio of Trademark Protection.
We love sunflowers at Erik M Pelton & Associates as a symbol of growth and renewal, and tie that into trademark and brand protection. We’ve been using the phrase, Making Trademarks Bloom since 1999® and using sunflowers for at least 10 years in our marketing, and I recently learned about the golden ratio and sunflowers. The golden ratio is an exponential curve which builds on itself and increases infinitely. It is found throughout nature—from the human body to plants—and creates structure and harmony intentionally by design.
The sunflower is a great example of this golden ratio. If you look at the inner circle of a sunflower—which appears to be rows of seeds—it’s actually not rows, it’s a spiral. The spiral is packed with density at the rate of the golden ratio to allow for the maximum number of seeds and impact to be packed into the size of that sunflower, and scientists have studied this.
The golden ratio is also found in art, music, design and many other places. We can apply it to trademark protection as well. The more a business protects its trademark, the more that protection will build on itself over time and expand. When a business starts out and chooses a unique and bold brand name, that’s going to add to more protection over time. When a brand goes through the process to apply and register with USPTO, that’s going to lead to building and growing more protection over time. When a brand takes steps to monitor and enforce their trademark, that leads to this sort of increase doubling down over and over again for more protection.
The golden ratio is just one way to think about building your trademark protection. The more you invest in trademark protection, the more protection you get and the more you get out of it.
