Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Importance Of Online Brand Protection

With the web becoming more dynamic and an essential part of every enterprise, it has become increasingly important to become proactive in identifying the brand abuses and exploits that happen online and tarnish brand reputation. Brand violation activities by cyber criminals negatively impact business operations by merging their internet domain name. Therefore, a protective online brand protection solution needs to be implemented.

When products are sold in online gray markets it affects the brand reputation of the enterprise. Furthermore, these enterprises lose important market share for not being able to arrive at a solution to protect their brand reputation. It is also essential that the higher management realize the significance of brand reputation management and the way it can influence short and long term objectives. Today there are online brand protection solutions that help in identifying gray market channel. The solution is also efficient in prioritizing violators and recognizing the syndicates that cause maximum brand erosion.

According to Gartner, the ideal online protection program should be well coordinated, cross departmental and needs to undertake an automated approach that goes beyond the legal department and includes marketing, brand management risk and supply chain management and loss prevention. The program should be active in tracking the brand abusers before they repeat the same attacks and resolve any issues of brand erosion and divert site traffic efficiently. In order to implement such a program the essential steps to take are:

* Recognizing all domain names in the service portfolio

* Monitoring the portfolio efficiently

* Monitoring for potential online abuses

* Responding to abuses

Some of the potential brand abuses take place in the following form:

* Cyber squatting

* Domain abuse

* Trademark infringement

* Traffic diversion schemes

* False associations with unrelated third parties

* Pay-per-click abuse

* Sponsored link abuse

* Logo and image abuse

* Offensive content

* Channel non-compliance with brand guidelines and/or pricing




It is important to keep your brand free from counterfeiting and gray market sales. Advanced online brand protection solutions apart from detecting counterfeits also help in putting an end to illegal brand operations. The solution efficiently and automatically send, cease and desist and DMCA letters. In addition to that it also offers automatic shutdowns. Furthermore, the solutions come with a network of authorized investigation as well as legal partners that helps end users to streamline the enforcement process and in turn helps to maintain a positive brand image.

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