So, you have a business or life coaching technique or something similar. You have created slides or materials for the coaching technique and you have a name. You would like to protect the coaching technique or philosophy. Is this possible?
Well, I can tell you that there is no great way to directly protect a coaching technique or philosophy. You can protect the name through trademark and you can protect the materials themselves through copyright.
But what if someone obtains the materials and they don’t actually copy them but they use your coaching technique? In this case, they haven’t infringed your trademark or copyright, so there isn’t a great way to stop them from using your ideas and coaching philosophy.
A coaching technique can be thought of as a process, which is typically covered by patents, but in the realm of coaching and philosophies, these processes don’t quite rise to the level of patentability because a coaching technique is primarily comprised of mental steps and ideas.
As I mentioned earlier, the coaching services offered to the consuming public can be trademarked and if anyone uses your trademarked name to offer similar services, you can enforce your trademark against them, but that still doesn’t actually protect the coaching technique.
Trademark will help you with brand recognition. If you offer a great coaching technique with great customer service, you can use your trademark to build up good will with respect to your services. Consumers will start to recognize your brand as offering exceptional quality and they will come to you for that reason.
Another option for protecting your coaching technique is by keeping it a trade secret. In this case, any of your employees or clients would be required to sign an NDA. This is probably not an ideal business model for most coaches. Also, if your objective is to grow your brand, then having people sign NDAs would potentially cut against that goal.
So whenever I get this question, I feel bad that I cannot help the person come up with a better intellectual property strategy. I know the person has worked hard to come up with an innovative coaching technique and process. That said, the combination of trademarks and copyrights is definitely better than nothing and these categories of intellectual property can be licensed to other practitioners.