Legally protecting your slogan

Short, sharp, and memorable: great taglines turn simple products into valuable brands

Legally protecting your slogan

A practical guide on creating taglines that you can trade mark

In today’s crowded food market, a great slogan can be just as powerful as your logo or product shot.

Under Australian law, that little line – “Have a Break” or “Life’s pretty straight”.

Under the Trade Marks Act 1995 (Cth), a trade mark can be a word, logo, phrase or slogan that distinguishes your goods or services from everyone else’s.

The same test applies as for single words: can your phrase actually distinguish you, or is it something every trader in your space would want to use?

Classic examples include “Aussie kids are Weet‑Bix kids”, “Just like a chocolate milkshake, only crunchy” and “The Fresh Food People” – short, memorable lines that instantly signal a particular brand, not a generic product type.

How case law treats slogans

If your slogan is really just basic advertising “spin”, it usually won’t qualify for trade mark registration in Australia. Trade mark law is looking for something that works as a brand – a sign that points to you and only you – not just a nice‑sounding line you could slap on any product. When you apply to register a slogan as a trade mark, IP Australia will ask: does this phrase actually distinguish your business, or is it something any competitor selling similar goods might reasonably want to use?

Phrases like “Best in Australia”, “Fresh and tasty”, “Quality you can trust”, “Made with love” or “Simply delicious” are all standard brag lines. They’re the kind of marketing slogans you see across supermarkets, food packaging and restaurant menus. Because these slogans are so generic and descriptive, the Trade Marks Office will usually reject them. The reasoning is simple: other traders in the same industry need to be free to use these everyday words to describe their own products and services. If one business could “lock up” “Fresh and tasty” as a trade mark for food, it would unfairly limit how everyone else can talk about their goods.

There is one narrow exception. A fairly ordinary slogan can sometimes be registered if you can prove that, over time, it has become strongly and uniquely linked to your brand in the minds of consumers. Think of “Just do it” for Nike – the words themselves are simple, but years of heavy, consistent use mean that most people now hear that phrase and instantly think of one company. In trade mark terms, the slogan has acquired distinctiveness through use. If you can show long‑term, extensive use of your slogan – for example, on packaging, in national advertising campaigns, on your website and social media, backed up with sales figures or survey evidence – you may be able to convince IP Australia that customers now see those words as your brand, not just generic advertising fluff.

What makes a strong, registrable food slogan?

Courts in Australia have looked at lots of slogans – some quite clever, some very ordinary – to decide which ones can actually be registered as trade marks and which are “just advertising.” In Comfort Shirt Co Pty Ltd’s Application (No 4), for example, the slogan “Irons itself automatically in the wash” was examined to see whether it really signalled the maker, or just described what the shirts supposedly did. In Johnson & Johnson Pty Limited’s Application, the phrase “Best for baby, best for you” raised the same issue: is this a brand “flag” or just a nice‑sounding claim about quality?

Australian decisions like these show a clear pattern – a slogan can be protected if it does more than describe product features or benefits and instead captures an idea, attitude or brand promise that feels uniquely tied to your business, rather than the kind of line any competitor could honestly use.

Why bother registering your business slogan?

Registering a slogan as a trade mark is like putting a legal fence around a line your customers already love. Once it’s registered for your chosen goods and services, you have the exclusive right to use that slogan as a brand in Australia for those products, and you can stop competitors from using the same or a confusingly similar line in the same space. Instead of just being “nice wording in an ad”, it becomes part of your brand toolkit – something you can actually rely on if a rival tries to piggy‑back on your hard‑won recognition.

Registration doesn’t last forever, but it’s very long‑term by marketing standards. In Australia, a trade mark registration initially runs for 10 years from the filing date, and you can renew it every 10 years indefinitely as long as you pay the renewal fees and keep using the mark in a genuine way. Once your slogan is registered, you can also use the ® symbol with it (for the registered goods/services), which sends a clear signal to others that this isn’t just a catchy phrase – it’s protected. Until it’s registered, you should stick to ™ to show you’re claiming it as a trade mark.

Because it can be renewed over and over, a good slogan registration often becomes a valuable business asset in its own right. It can be licensed (for example, to distributors or co‑branding partners), enforced if someone copies it, and taken into account when investors or buyers value your brand. For a food or FMCG business that lives on supermarket shelves and in social media, that means the line people chant back to you in ads isn’t just “fluff” – with registration, it’s part of the IP portfolio that underpins the value of the company.

What we can do for you

At Sharon Givoni Consulting, we help food and FMCG brands turn great taglines into real legal assets, not just clever copy. We can:

• Review your existing and proposed slogans for distinctiveness and legal risk.
• Conduct trade mark searches to see what’s already out there in your product space.
• Advise which slogans are strong enough to file, and which are better left as unregistered marketing lines.
• Draft and file trade mark applications in the right classes for your products and future brand plans.
• Help you integrate slogans into packaging, campaigns and licensing so the use actually supports registration and enforcement.
• Act if someone copies or “tweaks” your slogan in a way that risks confusion in the market.

Please note the above article is general in nature and does not constitute legal advice.

Please email us info@iplegal.com.au if you need legal advice about your brand or another legal matter in this area generally.