The Choice of Trademarks

Choosing a trademark, particularly for consumer products, often leads to a struggle between lawyers and marketing executives. Marketing executives very often want to choose a name for the product that will describe or suggest the qualities of their product as much as possible in order to use the chosen name to advertise the value of their company s product. Lawyers, on the other hand, know it is very hard to protect words that are descriptive or suggest qualities of a product against the use by others of similar words. 

Words that suggest, but do not describe qualities of the products receive the second broadest scope of protection. It is often difficult to distinguish between words that are suggestive and words that are descriptive of qualities of the products. 

Words that are merely descriptive do not receive any legal protection unless the company putting out the product has advertised so persuasively in the relevant market that potential customers know that the descriptive word really identifies a product that comes from a particular source (even though the consumer may not know the name of the company that is the source of the prod- 

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