Trademarks are one of the primary ways for a medical device company to convey their brand to patients, medical professionals and healthcare systems. Since trademarks are a distinctive way for consumers to identify your company and its products, it is important to choose trademarks that fit with your company’s branding strategy. Your company most likely labored over deciding what trademarks to associate with your company, products and brand.
Trademarks Convey Brand, and Brands Can Earn Customers’ Trust
Trademarks are important tools for promoting brand recognition, promoting your company and its products and for fostering a sense of trust between the products offered by your company and your customers. When it comes to medical devices in particular, maintaining a brand that is trusted and well-known as being reliable and safe is important. Patients could very well have to depend on the quality of your medical product to ensure their well-being, safety and health for years to come, and it is important that patients learn to trust your products and your brand.
Equally as important is developing trust with the healthcare professionals who use or implant your company’s products to treat patients. Healthcare professionals need to know that they can rely on your company’s products to work as intended every time, and through demonstrated use of your product healthcare professionals can grow to respect the quality of the products your company provides. Over time, your company can even benefit from recommendations made by healthcare professionals to their patients, e.g., “I recommend X-brand medical devices to all of my patients because X-brand is a brand that I trust as a medical professional.”
Protecting One of Your Most Valuable Assets – Your Brand
As trademark protection can be a valuable tool for protecting your medical device company’s brand, it is important to maintain your trademark rights and to regularly police the use of your trademarks. Valuable trademark rights can be lost through exercising an inadequate amount over control the use of licensed trademarks, conversion of the mark into a generic term for the device, or abandonment of the mark through discontinued use. With proper guidance, it is easy to maintain trademark protection for your company, products and brand.
Policing for the unauthorized use of your company’s trademarks is also important for protecting your company’s brand. It could be detrimental to your business operations if a competitor offered a copycat product that looks like your company’s own medical device product, but is of inferior quality. Consumers could be left particularly confused as to whether your company is responsible for producing the inferior quality product if the copycat product features a similar design to your product or if the copycat product features a confusingly similar logo or product name to the registered trademarks that your company rightly owns.
Protecting your registered trademarks in the medical device space is an active process, but is well worth the effort. If you need help securing trademark protection, or with policing and enforcing your trademark rights, you can speak with one of the trademark lawyers at The Rapacke Law Group. We offer a free initial consultation to all of our prospective clients, and have a fixed fee payment structure that is very attractive to our medical device clients that have strict IP budgets.
