5 Essential Brand Protection Strategies

With more businesses moving online, your brand has never been more important. Your brand and using it effectively can enhance the value of your business, communicate your brand culture and carve out its unique place within the market. More business owners understand how vital a consistent brand strategy is. Few realize that along with your brand should also come protection strategies.

Your business’s successes can attract no-good imitators who hope to make a quick buck off your hard work. They can do this by stealing and imitating your brand – which can have detrimental effects – as such, using measures such as a residential proxy like the ones provided by Smartproxy, along with other strategies, are critical to keeping your brand safe.

What Is Brand Protection?

The name is pretty self-explanatory, but brand protection is the process of protecting a company’s intellectual property, including any branding from counterfeiters, copyright infringements and other ways that your brand can be used negatively by others. This can include stealing patents, design rights, color marks, and trade dress.

Brand protection isn’t only essential to protect your business’s revenue. It is also critical to protect your business’s image, reputation, and overall value. By implementing strategies such as using a residential proxy as an added layer of security along with other measures, you can protect your brand.

Why Is it Important to Protect Your Brand?

Brand protection is critical to ensure that your business is protected from brand abuse. Brand abuse is the term used to describe an outside party that infringes on your brand’s intellectual property to take advantage of your success and reputation. There are different ways that brand abuse can come about. Some forms of brand abuse include:

• Counterfeiting
• Copyright piracy
• Patent theft 
• Social media impersonation
• Trademark squatting
• Rogue websites

While these forms are all used for their own purposes, counterfeiting is currently the most pervasive form of brand abuse. Businesses should remain vigilant and put protective strategies such as security software, a use of residential proxy, SSL encryption, and others to avoid becoming victims of these attacks.

5 Brand Protection Strategies

Now that we’ve covered the importance of brand protection, it’s time to look at the strategies you can implement immediately to keep your brand safe.

Register Your Intellectual Property

The first step you can take to protect your brand is registering your intellectual property. If you don’t formally register your intellectual property, there is very little you can legally do if you become a victim of brand abuse. The only way to ensure that you are legally protected is by registering your intellectual property. This includes your logo, web content, and other media. This is also critical if your business relies on a trade secret, such as a particular recipe or formula. 

You can legally trademark your intellectual property and physically protect it by having SSL encryption on your website and using a residential proxy as a further protection method.

Have Non-Disclosure Agreements With All Your Partners

If you work with other companies, make sure that they sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Also, don’t be surprised if they ask you to do the same. After all, not having an NDA in place can be a considerable risk for your business, even if you believe the company you are working with is trustworthy. 

Educate Your Consumers 

Consumer education has many benefits when it comes to brand protection. You can use your online platforms to teach clients about your products, services, and brand. You can also teach them to spot fakes. This is a great way to improve your consumer’s trust in your brand as you are actively working on making sure they are not getting tricked by fraudsters. 

Remain Active on Social Media

Social media is one of the most effective ways to communicate and interact with your audience. Having an active presence on these platforms is a great way to build trust in your brand and solidify a good reputation. This is also one of the best ways to stay ahead of counterfeiters, as many of them rely on social media to catch their victims.

Allow Online Reviews

Recent surveys have shown that 63% of customers are more likely to purchase items from a company that has reviews on its website. Visitors who were able to evaluate reviews and the business’s responses to reviews were 105% more likely to make a purchase and generally spent 11% more than those who did not look at the reviews. These stats alone should persuade you that having reviews on your website is a good idea. Fraudsters and impersonators usually don’t show reviews as their interest isn’t in building a reputation and honest relationship with clients.

Final Thoughts

Protecting your brand and intellectual property is more critical than ever. There are many individuals out there just waiting to benefit from your success by stealing your content and media or impersonating your brand to make a quick buck. Luckily, there are measures you can put in place, such as registering your brand and intellectual content, using residential proxies, allowing online reviews, and more to keep your brand safe from abusers and thieves.