It started as viral content. Today it is a registered trademark that generates revenue. The distance between those two states is one application.
What changes when you register
Before registration, a creator has attention. Attention is not an asset: it cannot be licensed with confidence, it cannot be sold, and it cannot be defended against someone selling merchandise with your catchphrase on it.
After registration, the creator has an exclusive right in specified classes, an entry in a public register that deters copying, standing to demand takedowns from marketplaces and platforms, and something that can be assigned or licensed for money.
What creators typically get wrong
Waiting until the revenue justifies the cost. By then the name is visible enough that someone else may have filed it, and Mexico grants rights to the first to file.
Filing in the wrong classes. A registration for entertainment services does not stop anyone selling clothing under the same name.
Ignoring the underlying copyright. If the content includes a character design, an illustration or music, those are separate rights that need their own treatment.
The practical sequence
Run an availability search, file the name in the classes where you sell or expect to sell, and register the creative material with INDAUTOR. We do the search and the opinion at no cost.
Owning it beyond the trademark
A registration gives you the sign for the classes you filed. It does not settle the underlying image, and for a creator that gap is usually where the money is.
Copyright in the drawing or photograph exists from creation, registered or not (article 162 of the Mexican Federal Copyright Law), and registration before Indautor is what fixes authorship and date in a form you can rely on later. If someone else made the image for you, the economic rights are yours as the commissioner unless agreed otherwise (article 83), but the author keeps the unwaivable right to be credited (article 19).
If the creation is a character rather than a single image, there is a third protection: a reservation of rights before Indautor over the character, with its name and identity. That is the one licensing deals are written about, and the one creators almost never have.