If the turning of the decade has you (or an agency client) questioning the look or relevancy of your brand, perhaps you’ve made it your new year’s resolution to review, refresh or rebuild it from the inside out.

Whether for your agency and your products, or in supporting your clients, there are key areas to consider from the legal standpoint whether you’re managing a complete overhaul, or a simple update and makeover.

Protect yourself at each stage with the tips below and consult with your legal counsel for any unique aspects to your company or project.

Start With Who: Copyright, IP and Content Ownership

Every secure rebrand project starts with a clear path to ownership of the assets that get created to support the brand; such as logos, taglines, and the like. For starters, who created them – your client’s internal team, the agency team or a third party contractor?

If any party other than an employee of the brand itself created brand identity materials, ownership of copyright in those assets requires written documentation. Through tools like agency master service agreements and statements of work, independent contractor agreements, or assignment or license documents, as an agency your job includes seeing to it that the correct ownership of all assets and intellectual property being created, is correctly reflected.

And if you’ve launched the brand without proactively addressing ownership issues, there are some quick actions you can take to react quickly. Nothing works better than some advance planning here, though.

Trademark Protection

I’ve previously discussed “How to Protect Your Brand Trademarks in 4 Easy Steps,” covering trademark clearance, registration, maintenance and monitoring for brands. Trademark issues can arise at any stage of deploying the new brand. Address brand clearance issues as early as possible with legal counsel (ideally handling trademark pre-clearance before pitching the brand to your client).

There’s a lot to protect here, including, but not limited to:

• Considering a new name for your business or product.
• A completely new or updated logo, or new lock up of name and logo.
• New website design or URL.
• New tagline or slogan.
• A new color palette. (Can you/should you trademark a color or worry about your color choices? The short answer is, it’s not a huge area of concern, but it shouldn’t be completely disregarded, as shown in the more recent articles on Hustle, Can a corporation “own” a color? and Fast Company, T-Mobile is suing a company for using magenta. Can it really ‘own’ a color? )

Even a small update or change to the representation of your brand warrants working through these steps of due diligence along with your client.

Speaking of which, have a firm understanding with your clients (hopefully one that is documented in your service agreement) about which party will be responsible for trademark issues related to launching a brand.

Protecting Your Launch

There is more to think about than ever before when it comes to launching your brand. Such as your brand audit, guidelines and agreement to ensure all properties are updated, internally and externally, and that employees and partners alone correctly employ the new brand standards.

The HubSpot blog offers a helpful overview of high-level considerations when executing a rebrand project. The tactics and concerns run parallel when launching a completely new brand or product.

Additionally, when executing your email, social and traditional launch communications plans about the brand, work within modern compliance guidelines to collaborate effectively with the client about the brand launch.

Lastly, are you prepared for social media commentary and outside opinions? You don’t have to be a large consumer brand to fall victim to criticism.

Let’s hear from you! Are you plotting or planning a rebrand in 2020? What areas of concern do you have? Contact me to continue the conversation!