The internet has brought many benefits for marketing but it has also opened organisations up to a host of threats to their brands, including brand abuse, online fraud and unauthorised distribution channels. Social networking and blogging have all brought additional risks as brand hijackers (or brandjackers) steal customers and revenues through exploitation.
One of a company’s most important assets, a brand can affect revenues, reputations and customer relationships. But the openness of the internet means it is increasingly difficult to police, and customers may not even know when they are dealing with an imposter rather than the ‘real thing’.
What can you do to protect your brand online?
Stay ahead of the game
Make a point of understanding the types of fraudulent activities that are taking place today and keep abreast what is happening in the future.
Examples of current abuse includes:
- Diverting traffic – from one site to another using a brand as a key word in search engine searches
- Pay per click fraud – generating revenue illicitly by imposters
- SEO manipulation – violating search engine rankings
- Cybersquatting or typosquatting – registering popular or well-known domain names and then selling them for inflated prices. Sometimes people also use domain names incorrectly to divert traffic to an illicit site.
- Phishing – using email and social media to obtain personal information, such as credit card numbers.
Technology
Stay abreast of new and upcoming technologies that can help protect your website and brand. This includes brand monitoring technologies, and anti phishing and virus technologies.
Legal advice
Make sure you follow the latest online legal advice to protect your brand and implement any policies that you can.
Brand protection services
These can be expensive but dependent on your type of business, a brand protection service may be a valuable asset. They offer many services, including ecommerce monitoring which identifies unauthorised product sales, detecting intellectual property infringements, domain management and acquiring market intelligence from chat rooms and message boards.
Read more on brand protection services.
Further information
Visit the Intellectual Property office site - http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipenforce/ipenforce-resources.htm
