Trademarks, ideas, and viruses

Seth Godin, writer and marketing guru, is one of my favorite blogs to read. I am an avid reader of Seth's books and FREE PDFs on all things business and marketing. I encourage you to check him out if you own a business or if you work for someone, it doesn't matter because in reality we are all marketers of something. Your favorite: restaurant, book, blog, car, whatever it might be.

Seth's riff on Trademarks was particularly interesting. As a small business start-up, David and I were concerned about our "idea" being taken. We didn't want someone's "R&D" or Rob and Duplicate department grabbing our idea before we were to market. So we filed for Trademark for Animal Traks (tm). We are waiting to hear back from the USPTO, but that could be up to a year. Both David and myself realize that "ideas" are fleeting and there really is "nothing new under the sun." But we still wanted to keep the honest people honest.

Seth points out that "protecting" the idea with a Trademark in the end doesn't protect your idea if you are sitting all alone with it. So we don't place all our confidence in the Trademark protection and we hope that our brand Animal Traks will be associated with a company that is in business to assist the non-profit foundations we support (Rafiki and The Wild) to care for the children and animals.

And as Seth writes, "If actively protecting your trademark is going to get in the way of making your idea spread, the choice is obvious--spread the idea."

I first came across Seth when he wrote an article for Fast Company magazine called "Unleash Your Ideavirus." What an incredible article for insight into how to launch ideas. Animal Traks is currently working the Ideavirus. Let us know if you are a "sneezer" by emailing us and all your friends and family.