IPMA has registered our brands as trademarks. Trademark registration, in addition to other privileges, means that others cannot use our trademarks without our permission, or without acknowledging our ownership of them.
You cannot, for example, legally use our ICB® in a name or service, or even a website, such as ICB-Training.net, in the same International class or classes we have registered it in.
IPMA Marks
Here is a list of our current IPMA trademarked items or brands:
- IPMA®
- ICB®
- IPMA Level-A®
- IPMA Level-B®
- IPMA Level-C®
- IPMA Level-D®
- IPMA Delta®
Our IPMA Graphic Logo is also a registered trademark. Effective immediately, all use of the IPMA Graphic Logo must include the registration mark. Please note the correct placement of the registration mark in the logo at right.
Please contact us if you are authorised to use our logo, and you do not have the official version of the graphic. We can make it available in multiple formats. Thank you!
Use of IPMA Marks
IPMA Member Associations have the right to use these marks as part of their current Membership Agreement. Still, we all must follow the same guidelines as everyone else, to protect our mark. Those rules include:
- The first time an IPMA trademark is used in a document, it must show the ® mark, and the bottom of the page, the front pages of a book, or at the end of the document, must include the statement (using ICB as our example), “ICB is a registered trademark of IPMA in Switzerland and other countries.”
- In electronic use, such as on a website, the ® mark must be shown the first time the mark is used on any page. One place on the website must also have the same statement as above, ICB is a registered trademark of IPMA in Switzerland and other countries.
- We discourage the use of the ® mark more than once per page for the same brand. Thus, a page that contains multiple mentions of ICB, for example, should not have the ® each time.
- Note the convention that we prefer for the registration mark. It is below the vertical centerline of the letters. This is primarily our consistent style preference. On websites we achieve this with code: <sub>®</sub>.
- Where easy to do, we also prefer sans serif typefaces for the registration mark, and also prefer to make it slightly smaller than the text, so it does not increase line height.
- As alluded to in the example with the ICB above, the IPMA brands are not to be combined with other words in any commercial, governmental, educational, or not-for-profit organization’s printed or electronic materials; that is a violation of our trademarks.
Thank you for your understanding and consideration in your use of our IPMA intellectual property!