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You’re thrilled! You’ve settled on a name for your new breakfast cereal company: “Yummy Tummy.” You’ve even invented a cartoon character, “Yummy Tummy Tillie,” to symbolize your brand. You’re ready to set the world on fire!

Not so fast. Before you can make your company a household name, you need to make sure you can use and protect that name. You don’t want to invest money and time building “brand equity”—value associated with the name of your company—just to discover someone else is already using “Yummy Tummy.”

That’s where trademark laws come in. There are two primary kinds of trademarks:

Trademark

Service mark

When you acquire the rights to a trademark or service mark, you get legal protection from other companies’ using your company’s name, logos, taglines, or other distinctive marks on competing products or services.

Even when you are granted a trademark, you don’t “own” the name in all instances. As part of the trademark application process, you’ll indicate the specific category or categories of products or services for which you’ll use the name. For instance, if you’re using “Yummy Tummy” for breakfast cereal, someone else could get the rights to use the same name for unrelated products or services—a weight-loss program, for instance.