It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Trademark. (Discuss)

In some countries, notably the United States, a trademark used to identify a service rather than a product is called a service mark (^SM). Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... A trademark (Commonwealth English: trade mark) is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to distinguish the business and its products or services from those of other businesses. ... A trademark (Commonwealth English: trade mark) is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to distinguish the business and its products or services from those of other businesses. ... In economics and marketing, a service is the non-material equivalent of a good. ...

Under the US law, service marks have a different standard of use in order to count as a use in commerce, which is necessary to complete registration and to stop infringement by competitors. A trademark normally needs to be used on or directly in association with the sale of goods, such as on a store display. As services are not defined by a concrete product, use of a service mark in advertisements is instead accepted as a use in commerce. Generally speaking, advertising is the paid promotion of goods, services, companies and ideas by an identified sponsor. ...

The service mark symbol is found in Unicode at U+2120. The HTML entity for this symbol is thus ℠ or ℠. Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... HTML has been in use since 1991 (note that the W3C international standard is now XHTML), but the first standardized version with a reasonably complete treatment of international characters was version 4. ...

See also

• Certification mark
• Marketing
• Trademark