Declaring marks you already own

If you already own trademarks, the search will find them — and without being told, the analysis would treat them as obstacles to your own application. Declaring them fixes that.

What they are, and why they exist

An assessment answers “who could stop me?” by listing earlier marks that are similar to yours. That question only makes sense about other people’s marks. Your own earlier registration is similar to your new application by design — that is the whole point of a brand family — but it is not an obstacle. It is an argument in your favour.

Declared marks are therefore excluded from the conflict analysis (you will see them called excluded marks) and moved into a section of their own, where they are weighed as the applicant’s prior rights.

Skipping this step costs you twice:

• Your Registration Outlook is dragged down by a “conflict” that does not exist.
• You lose the positive weight of genuinely owning an earlier, similar mark — which can neutralise a citation that would otherwise count against you.

If you own nothing yet, ignore the section entirely; it is optional and blank by default.

Where to declare them

In step 4 of the assessment wizard, expand Your marks. It is optional, and marked as such.

Two ways to declare

By owner name

Type the holder name exactly as it appears on the register. This is the important part: matching is exact, so “Acme Holdings B.V.” will not match a register entry reading “Acme Holdings BV”. Check the spelling on one of your own registrations first.

Add as many holder names as you need — useful when your portfolio sits across several group companies.

By application or registration number

Type the number. This is the more reliable route, and it does more work than you might expect:

• The number is looked up in the register directly, so it counts even if the similarity search never surfaced that mark.
• Once one mark is matched, the same holder’s other marks are pulled in automatically.

Declaring a single registration number is often enough to cover a whole portfolio.

Marks are never matched by mark name — only by holder or number.

What they look like in the finished report

Declared marks appear in a Your own marks section, each chip showing whether it was matched by owner or by number, above the note that they were kept out of the similar-marks analysis and weighed as your prior rights.

If a mark you expected is missing from that section, it did not match the register — see the limits below.

Limits

• Up to 50 declaration rules per assessment.
• Up to 8 resolved own marks per country.
• Entries that cannot be matched are simply ignored — they never cause an error. If a mark you expected does not appear in the Your own marks section, the name or number did not match the register.

If you find your own mark in the results afterwards

You cannot add declarations to a finished report. Either re-run the assessment with the declaration in place, or, if you have an eligible plan, remove that mark from the analysis using edit mode.