All brands need some level of ownership. Here’s the fourth of our ten pointers to help give your brand the edge over the competition.

4 – Ownability

At the basic level this just means you’re the only one using the name for your product in your immediate vicinity. It could be a small niche or local business. As long as your name is identified with your product or service, customers will find you and hopefully buy things.

Ownability steps up a gear when you need a name for a bigger market – like nationally or internationally. The chance of someone beating you to it is suddenly greater.

The final phase of ownability is of course the registered trademark. With one of these in place you can protect your name from competitors in categories and markets of your choice.

Other ownability tactics include the creative use of spelling. Mitsubishi’s innovative electric car, the i mieuv makes use of this combined with another recent trend, prefixing the brand with an i. You’re supposed to read it as ‘I move’.

Come back soon for part 5 – Start the story with the name…