Using the Registered Symbol
The registered sign is the one mark on this site that comes with a legal condition attached. It means "this trademark is registered with the relevant office" — the USPTO in the United States, the EUIPO for the European Union, the UKIPO in Britain — and it should not appear until the certificate exists. In the US, falsely displaying ® can be treated as deceptive and can cost a company the right to recover damages in a later infringement case, so lawyers are strict about it. Until registration goes through, the trademark symbol does the same job with no risk.
Position and spacing
Like ™, the sign is drawn as a superscript and sits tight against the mark: Nova®. Do not add a space, and do not apply superscript formatting on top of the character. In body copy the usual practice is to show it on the first or most prominent mention only, then drop it, so a product page might read "Nova® headphones" in the title and plain "Nova" everywhere below.
Registered where?
Registration is territorial. A brand registered only in Germany is, strictly, unregistered in Canada, and a careful company will use ™ in markets where its filing has not been granted. In reality most global brands display ® everywhere once they hold at least one major registration, and enforcement of the distinction is rare, but if you run a small business the cautious route is to match the sign to each country you sell in.
Not for creative work
Because it contains a letter in a circle, ® is often confused with the copyright symbol. They protect different things: copyright covers the expression of an idea (a photo, a song, a paragraph), while a registered trademark covers a sign that identifies where goods come from. A logo can carry both, but the ® belongs to the brand, not the artwork.
Rendering and lookalikes
The character is part of Latin-1, so it displays on every phone, browser and game client, and it survives copy-pasting into plain-text fields where formatting is stripped. Two lookalikes cause trouble. The circled capital Ⓡ from the enclosed alphanumerics block is much larger, sits on the baseline and has no legal meaning, though it is popular as a decoration in aesthetic Instagram bios alongside the other aesthetic symbols. The pharmacy sign ℞ has a tail on the R and means "take" on prescriptions.
On social media
Unlike ™, which people use as a joke, ® mostly appears in bios for its intended purpose — small brands and creators who have registered their name and want to show it. Occasionally it turns up in usernames purely as a shape, where the circle reads as a tidy badge next to a display name.