Glossary
French: nom de marque
The brand name (nom de marque) is the denomination for which a trademark is filed. In everyday speech it is simply called “the trademark” or “the brand” — but legally, a trademark consists of a brand name (also called the sign) and a list of goods and services. The brand name is the designation by which the mark will be referred to.
Splitting the brand name from the goods-and-services list is not a bureaucratic formality — it drives how the mark is examined and enforced. The same word can be registered by unrelated businesses for unrelated goods under the principle of specialty, and a conflict between two brand names is assessed together with the similarity of goods and services they cover, not the words in isolation. A US trademark owner used to thinking of “the brand” as a single, indivisible asset should keep in mind that, procedurally, French and EU examiners and opposition divisions always analyze the sign and the goods or services as two separate, cumulative questions.
Not all marks include a word at all: it is possible to register colors, sounds, and logos without any lettering as trademarks. In those cases the “name” of the brand exists only commercially, not as part of the registration. A purely figurative mark — a logo with no readable word element — has no nom de marque in the legal sense, even though the business may still refer to it by a name in its marketing.
Many marks combine a word and a graphic element (a stylized name plus a logo). French and EU practice generally treats the word element as dominant when assessing likelihood of confusion, on the theory that consumers refer to a mark verbally more often than they describe its graphics — though this is not an absolute rule, and a highly distinctive figurative element can outweigh a weak or descriptive word component. This has practical filing consequences: registering the word element alone, separately from the logo, is often advisable so that word-only protection is not lost if the logo is later redesigned.
US marketing and legal usage tends to distinguish “brand” (the commercial identity) from “trademark” (the legal right). French usage compounds the ambiguity because marque means both. When French counsel refers to the nom de marque, they mean the verbal element as filed — what a US practitioner might call the word mark or the literal element of the mark. Whether that verbal element is protectable depends on its distinctive character for the goods and services covered.
Before adopting a brand name for the French or EU market, its availability should be verified through a clearance search. Because French and English share a great deal of vocabulary and phonetics, a brand name that seems safely distinctive in the US can occasionally read as merely descriptive, or can collide phonetically with an existing French or EU mark, in ways that would not surface from a US-only search.
The brand name is the starting point of choosing a trademark and the first thing checked in any trademark clearance search. See also trademark, trademark availability, and trademark filing.