3 Ways to Monetize Your Trademarks in Canada

In today’s fast-changing world, intangible assets, such as Intellectual Property (IP), are the main currency that dictates a business’s success. As such, regardless of niche, activity, and style, every business must learn how to protect its IP assets.

After all, without proper IP protection methods, the brands we know and love would not exist. These protections allow businesses to capitalize on their ideas and build an image that’s unique to a specific brand. In time, businesses even get to profit from the images they’ve built due to the feelings that are often associated with the logo or the branding.

So, what does it mean to protect your IPs? Depending on the situation, businesses have tools such as patents, copyrights, trademarks, and more to protect various assets. Once registered with the proper authorities, these assets can be monetized as is or used to build further profit.

If you’re curious, here are 3 ways to monetize your trademarks.

Understand What a Trademark Is

According to the official definition, a trademark is any recognizable insignia, phrase, word, or symbol that helps a brand legally differentiate from its competitors. The trademark is designed to help a brand or product create a unique identity on the market. However, trademarks have a special status since they can be registered or not (both have validity in the eyes of Canadian law).

However, if you want to monetize your trademarks, it’s best to register them. Overall, it’s rather easy to register trademarks in Canada and it lasts for 10 years before you have to renew. While you can sell an unregistered trademark as well, registration offers an extra layer of protection and makes the sale process less of a hassle for the owner.

3 Ways to Monetize your Trademarks

Did you know Google’s trademark value is around $44.3 billion? Or that Walmart’s sits nicely at around $36 billion? True, we’re talking about giants of their fields here, but a valuable trademark takes time to build.

The idea is that your trademarks could also value billions of dollars someday. You never know.

Still, if you don’t feel like waiting a few decades before making some profit off your IPs, here are the top 3 ways to monetize your trademarks:

1.    License your trademark

This is quite a common practice and you can see it everywhere from the t-shirts that carry Disney’s latest characters or movies to cosmetics emblazoned with a celebrity’s name to gather more attention from customers.

The process of licensing allows another company to use your trademark(s) for their products (for a fee, of course). This way, they’ll use your reputation and branding to boost theirs.

2.    Co-branding

In this scenario, you partner up with another company to create a new product that will unite both of your audiences. Think about the collaboration between Nike and Apple where these two giants created an Apple watch aimed at athletic people.

This way, both brands got to win an extra share of customers and managed to create a lot of exposure for their own branding.

3.    Finding investors or securing financing

IPs are valuable assets even when you don’t monetize them. First, you can use the concepts to create interesting new products, but more importantly, you can flaunt them to attract investments.

Investors like a startup with a fully-stocked IP cupboard, so make sure to never miss a chance to protect your intangible assets.

Wrap Up

When used right, trademarks can be incredibly valuable for your brand. Sure, it may take a bit of time and work until customers start to recognize your brand, but that’s just how things go. Overall, it’s crucial to protect all your IPs and make sure they are properly registered. Not to mention that you can earn more for a trademark registered on multiple markets (such as TAAT^Ⓡ).

Of course, direct monetization may not always be the answer, but you can use trademarks to create opportunities for your startup and open roads.