Beyond my brand name and logo, I also use a specific catchy slogan consistently across my marketing in Malta, and I’d like to know whether a short phrase like this can actually be registered as a trademark in its own right, separate from my main brand name.
Yes, a slogan or tagline can potentially be registered as a trademark under the Trademarks Act, Chapter 416 of the Laws of Malta, provided it meets the same core requirements as any other trademark, namely being sufficiently distinctive to identify your specific business as the source of the goods or services, rather than being a purely descriptive or generic phrase that other businesses would reasonably need to use, since purely descriptive slogans, such as ones simply describing a product's quality or function in plain terms, often face genuine difficulty meeting the distinctiveness threshold required for registration. Examining agents at the Industrial Property Registrations Directorate (IPRD) will assess your slogan against these same distinctiveness criteria applied to any trademark application, meaning a genuinely memorable, unique phrase closely associated with your brand has a reasonable prospect of successful registration, whereas a more generic or purely laudatory phrase may face objections during examination. Given that assessing distinctiveness for slogans specifically can involve genuine nuance, it would be worth having a trademark agent or IP lawyer review your specific slogan before filing, to properly assess its registrability and advise on whether any adjustment to the wording might strengthen its prospects of successful registration.
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