5 Tips for Your Brand Protection

In a world where anyone can have access to information on the internet, you want to keep all your assets intact and away from the hands of anyone who might use them illegally. The security of your brand’s assets, both tangible and intangible, is vital for several reasons. Some of these include protecting both your revenue and reputation.

However, securing your intangible assets may be more challenging than securing your tangible assets, mostly because these assets are non-physical and easily accessible on the internet. Therefore, you will need a strategy with practical tips to help you get the job done, and this is what we seek to bring you in this short article.

What is brand protection?

Online brand protection is defined as the measures taken to protect the brand’s identity, the right image, reputation, and other intangible assets across social media and the internet. It involves the consistent monitoring, detection, validation, enforcement, and reporting of any abuse or threat that may affect the brand.

Abuse of a brand can have hazardous consequences, including losing customers’ trust, financial loss, and losing any competitive advantage the brand might have. None of these above consequences is good for the brand’s internal revenue. For example, in 2017, Equifax incurred some damages due to a lack of proper brand protection, and by 2019, it had lost a total of $1.23 billion in company revenue.

How brand protection works?

Online brand protection works through a simple process with these four actionable steps:

• Detection

The team needs to be online regularly to detect when the brand asset is being used to manufacture and market counterfeits on rogue websites or when the company is being impersonated online.

• Validation

Once any form of infringement has been detected, the next process is usually to validate that what has been observed is indeed an infringement on the brand’s assets. This usually helps to avoid instances of the brand mistaking another legitimate business for an infringer.

• Enforcement

After the action has been confirmed to be an infringement, the next step is to enforce certain activities such as taking down fake products or websites and removing any form of brand impersonation on social media.

• Reporting

At the end of the three processes above, reports must be made, and records kept for infringement cases. This information comes in handy when you need to improve your strategy to file a lawsuit.

Reactive vs. proactive brand protection strategies

No industry in the world is saved from this evil, as some unscrupulous elements will take advantage of any opportunity that they can find. Last year in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, infringers across 90 countries took the liberty to manufacture falsified products and counterfeit drugs amounting to the sum of $14 million.

While Interpol succeeded in seizing these drugs, the ugly fact remains that these internet scoundrels are always working to cause as much harm as possible. There is, therefore, the need for brands to enact strategies that can help protect their assets and customers. And while some companies do this proactively, others choose to work with reactive systems.

A proactive strategy includes all measures taken to forestall brand abuse. The standards are put in place and fully operational even before an infringement occurs. The proactive protection steps include monitoring the brand domain and social media, engaging customers online and offline, continually monitoring all key marketplaces, and having a unique voice that your customers know and can quickly recognize.

On the other hand, a reactive strategy involves steps taken to avert brand abuse that has been detected to prevent it from doing any further damage. The process generally includes monitoring and accessing key marketplaces, social media, and domains and then removing any form of impersonation or infringement.

5 tips to help you secure your brand online

Here are five tips to help you effectively secure your brand online:

• Take proactive measures and register your assets

It is easy to overlook certain things like registering any intellectual property your company has. However, securing your brand online means applying for registration as early as possible; before any infringement even happens

• Constant monitoring is key

Monitoring your brand image and other properties may take serious work but is necessary nonetheless.

Keeping your brand safe means you will have to keep a tap on everything from the internet to social media. It is necessary always to see what is about to happen to your brand image before it even happens. That way, brand damage will be minimal and easy to remedy. One of the most practical ways to monitor the web for brand protection is web scraping. Web scraping allows companies to gather vast amounts of information from various sources automatically. Collecting data is key to monitoring the web for threats. Visit Oxylabs website for more information about web scraping for brand protection.

• Engage your customers

In many cases, your customers tend to contact the infringers and their fake products before you even do. Engaging them will give you the advantage of discovering early enough. You can then do whatever it takes to destroy the infringement.

• Pay attention to counterfeiters

Even in the tiniest amount, counterfeits can have damaging repercussions on your brand and your customers’ lives. Not only are these fake products dangerous to consume, but they also motivate your customers to lose trust and confidence in your brand.

The result is a bruised reputation and shrinking revenue.

• Always report and keep records

Any act of infringement needs to be reported to safeguard other businesses and customers. Also, keeping records can improve your protection strategy and be used in lawsuits in the future.

Conclusion

The need for brand protection is necessitated by the recent activities of nefarious actors looking to steal intellectual properties to produce and sell counterfeit goods and services.

And brands that do not take their protection seriously end up paying more than just money. The information and tips provided here aim to help you do a better job of protecting your brand and its assets online.