European Community Trademark and Brand Equity

The Community trade mark has effectively been available since April 1, 1996, although recourse to this tool does not imply abandonment of protection at a national level - something still of interest to SMEs. Market globalisation has led to increasingly more frequent horizontal and vertical integration being carried out between companies, with the effect being that of 'anchoring' the trade mark more and more to company strategy, rather than to the need of identifying itself as the industrial or commercial source of the products actually positioned on the market. The community trade mark is the first legal tool to have been created to serve the new economic environment being laboriously created in Europe.