Would misspelling/leaving characters out of the brand name improve my chances of successful trademark registration?

Photo of Tomas Orsula

Written by Tomas Orsula

Senior Trademark Attorney

No. Deliberate misspellings, phonetic alternatives (such as "2B" for "to be"), or the removal of characters are not considered prominent enough to distinguish a mark from a confusingly similar competitor. IP offices assess marks based on their overall impression, including phonetic and conceptual similarity, rather than just exact spelling. For example, filing “BLVST” to avoid “BLAST” would not work.

A misspelled version of a conflicting mark is likely to be considered confusingly similar to it. If a name conflict exists, the effective solutions are to change the name meaningfully, add a distinctive visual element, or narrow the goods and services list to avoid the conflicting class.

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