Franchisors and franchisees sign franchise contracts and open franchise chain stores to promote a certain brand of goods or services to the public, and their core intellectual property rights are trademarks. Generally speaking, trademarks have a certain popularity. Franchisees hope to quickly expand the market and make profits by virtue of the good reputation of branded goods or services, while franchisees can directly make profits through intangible assets, thus further expanding their business scale and brand benefits. For example, in the above case, the plaintiff A company owns the trademark "T", and the "T" chain food store has a certain scale in Shanghai and enjoys a certain popularity among ordinary consumers. The defendant obtained the franchise right of "T" brand and opened a "T" franchise store by signing a franchise contract with plaintiff A company. For the use of trademarks in franchise contracts, both parties usually agree that the franchisor will allow the franchisee to use trademarks in the agreed way during the contract period. After the expiration of the contract, the franchisee shall stop using the franchise marks and logos with trademarks as the core. In some disputes, if the franchisee continues to use the franchise mark after the franchise contract expires, the franchisor will choose to file a trademark infringement lawsuit.

Besides trademarks, brand names, trade secrets, unique names, packaging and decoration of well-known commodities, as well as copyrights and patent rights, may all become rights objects in franchise contracts, among which brand names and unique names and packaging and decoration of well-known commodities are more prominent. Because, the most intuitive impression of chain operation to ordinary consumers is that they all have the same store name, which is what we call the font size in the enterprise name. Moreover, the brand names of franchise stores are often the same or basically the same as trademarks, such as the "T" food store in the above case. On the other hand, in order to keep the image of chain stores unified, franchisees opened by franchisees are generally designed and decorated by franchisees, and some even include purchasing unified household appliances. For example, in the above case, Xu paid the design fee and equipment purchase fee to Company A for opening a "T" franchise store. Therefore, the unified store recruitment and decoration style of franchise stores is an intellectual property protected by law because of its visual enhancement.