Protecting Slogans and Taglines Under Nepalese Law

The registerable core: distinctiveness

A slogan is just a sign, and a sign is registrable if it distinguishes your goods or services from others' (Section 18). The test applied to slogans is the same one applied to words — with a structural headwind: slogans are usually phrases of ordinary language, and phrases that describe the product's quality, purpose or origin cannot distinguish it.

Hence the split. 'Quality you can trust' describes every product ever sold; no trader can monopolise it. 'Thik Chha!' attached to a specific product, or a coined phrase like a brand name, can function as a badge — registrable in the class where the goods sit.

• Registrable: coined phrases, wordplay, arbitrary phrases in context — anything a consumer reads as a brand, not a boast
• Refused: laudatory and descriptive tags — 'best quality', 'genuine taste', 'proudly Nepali'
• The class matters: the same phrase may be distinctive for one product and descriptive for another

The refusal you should expect — and how to answer it

Expect a distinctiveness or descriptiveness query on a slogan application, and plan the response rather than resenting it. The levers:

• Amend the specification — the phrase may be distinctive for a narrower set of goods than first claimed
• Argue inherent distinctiveness — show the phrase is coined or arbitrary for the goods, with dictionary and market context
• Show acquired distinctiveness — evidence of use: sales, advertising spend, market recognition that the phrase has come to identify you
• Pair with the house mark — a composite filing (logo + slogan) where the combination is distinctive even if the tagline alone is arguable

Strategy: protect the few that carry weight

Slogans change with campaigns; brands persist. Filing every tagline is a budget leak — each application is a class fee, an examination, a renewal. The disciplined approach protects the slogans that behave like brands: long-running tags customers actually associate with you, phrases competitors have already imitated, and the one or two lines the company would fight over.

For everything else, the house mark does the legal work. A registration on the brand name covers the advertising that carries the slogan; what the slogan itself needs is policing, not registration — watching the Bulletin for applications that appropriate your tagline, and opposing inside the window when one appears.

Slogans on the register: search and watch

Slogan conflicts behave differently from name conflicts. Because tags are built from ordinary words, exact-match screening over-fires ('quality' alone hits hundreds of records) while phonetic screening under-fires. The practical read: screen the slogan as a phrase in your class, read the goods overlap, and weight recent applications most heavily — competitors copy live campaigns, not dead ones.

A watch that flags phrase-overlap in your classes keeps the policing side honest without drowning you in noise. As with names, the 90-day window is where a copied slogan is cheapest to stop.