Article 9 of the Trademark Law stipulates that a trademark to be registered in China shall have distinctive features and be easy to identify. Article 8 of the Trademark Law stipulates that any mark that can distinguish the goods of natural persons, legal persons or other organizations from those of others can apply for registration as a trademark. The above-mentioned law refers to the concepts of distinctiveness, identifiability and distinctiveness of trademarks.

the distinctiveness is mainly aimed at the relationship between the applied trademark and the existing trademark, which requires that it cannot be the same as or similar to the existing trademark. Paragraph 2 of Article 11 of the Trademark Law stipulates that the marks listed in the preceding paragraph can be registered as trademarks if they have acquired remarkable features after use and are easy to identify. This means that distinctiveness and identifiability are different concepts. Signs that meet the requirements of distinctiveness are undoubtedly identifiable, and signs without distinctiveness will not be significant anyway. However, recognizable signs are not necessarily significant. Some signs may be recognizable, but they can't meet the requirements of distinctiveness. However, in judicial practice, courts rarely distinguish between the concepts of distinctiveness and identifiability.

distinctiveness refers to the attribute that a logo allows consumers to identify the goods sold from a specific, although sometimes anonymous, source. The distinctive characteristics of a trademark refer to the characteristics that a trademark should have enough to distinguish the source of goods for the relevant public. In short, the distinctiveness of a trademark means that the logo has the ability to distinguish the source of goods. The distinctive features required by the trademark law include two aspects, namely, the components of the mark itself and the relationship and procedures between the mark and the goods or services it uses. This attribute of a trademark depends on the relationship between the trademark logo and the product attribute. The closer the relationship between trademark identification and commodity attributes, the weaker the significance; The more irrelevant, the stronger the significance. At the same time, the trademark with strong distinctiveness has strong repulsion to similar logos; On the contrary, trademarks with weak distinctiveness have weak repulsion to similar logos.

as far as the function of trademark identification and differentiation is concerned, only when the relevant public first treats the relevant mark as a mark indicating the source of goods or services, will the mark play a role of source differentiation among different providers of the same or similar goods or services, and the identification among the distinctive features of trademarks exists before the differentiation.

the Supreme People's Court thinks that recognizability pays attention to the relationship between trademark itself and goods or services, and there is no substantial difference between recognizability and distinctiveness when it comes to judging the distinctiveness of a specific mark used in a specific kind of goods or services, that is, it refers to the distinctive features of trademark marks; When judging different signs used on the same or similar goods or services, distinctiveness is essentially about the possibility of confusion. Therefore, it is of no substantive significance to analyze different levels of wells with identification and differentiation without specific environment.