What Is a Trademark?

By Kristi Waterworth – Updated Feb 26, 2025 at 3:15 PM

Key Points

Register a trademark to legally protect brand identity and ensure broad protection.
Understanding differences between trademark, patent, and copyright is crucial for protection.
Trademark clarity and recognizability are vital; unclear marks can face registration issues.

No matter what kind of business you're interested in owning, it's important that certain types of materials are protected. A trademark is one of the ways to protect those brand assets.

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Round black stamp that says Registered. — Image source: Getty Images.

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Trademarks can be incredibly valuable to companies, especially when they've been used for a while. Again, the Twitter fiasco is an excellent example of this. The Twitter branding was estimated to be worth between $4 billion and $20 billion, which was lost immediately when the company decided to drop the iconic blue bird from its intellectual stables (although most users continue to use the name Twitter).

Twitter not only acted as a recognizable beacon in the social media landscape but also served as a symbol of a company that behaved and did business in a certain way. Since dropping the Twitter brand, the social media site has been hemorrhaging advertisers. If Twitter were still publicly traded, the rebranding would have irreparably damaged shareholders, given the value of Twitter has since dropped as much as 90%, according to Musk.

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About the Author

Kristi Waterworth has been a contributing real estate and financial expert at The Motley Fool, covering real estate, investing, and personal finance topics, since 2020. Kristi has been interviewed by various TV media outlets and podcasts for her real estate investing expertise – from residential real estate to digital real estate and everything in between. Kristi’s journalist career spans over 25 years, and she has written about real estate investing, homeownership, and home construction specifically for the last decade. She was also previously a licensed Realtor and general building contractor before the Great Recession and housing market collapse. She holds a bachelor’s degree in American history from Columbia College in Missouri.

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