It is always advisable to protect your brand name by purchasing an advert for it as a keyword.
This will ensure that searchers looking for your brand name can always find you. The price of each click on it will usually be only a few pence because it is unlikely to be a competitive term (unless you have many distributors or retailers bidding on it).
However, we were recently approached by one of our Bristol internet marketing clients - Idhammar Systems. Idhammar the UK's leading providers of software for overall equipment effectiveness
(OEE) and computerised maintenance management software (CMMS). It had
another overall equipment effectiveness competitor bidding using its
trade name Idhammar. Was this legal?