6 best practices for building a comprehensive online brand protection program

 

Digital commerce presents brands with increasing opportunities, along with steadily rising threats. Counterfeit products flooding the markets, fraud, expanding grey market structures, phishing, impersonation, and IP theft are all prevalent dangers in today’s digital-first economy.

 

Ignoring these threats leads to staggering losses for brands and businesses, including a decline in revenue, erosion of consumer trust, and significant reputational damage. This is why brands and businesses increasingly search for strategic long-term solutions to protect their IP rights.

 

 

Symbolic image for the search for a brand protection solution and a concept for a brand

 

 

And the solution they arrive at is usually a comprehensive online brand protection program. Let’s take a look at some of the most important building blocks and practices you need for that.

 

 

Best Practice #1: Assessing your brand’s risk landscape

A risk assessment is essential to discover the exact threats surrounding your brand and measure their severity. Conduct a brand audit to identify where your brand is most vulnerable. This could be a specific market, a product or product line, an entire region, or a distribution channel.

 

Monitoring threats both offline and online is crucial for identifying them and measuring their severity. Targeted software tools are the most effective for tracking infringements across platforms (e.g., social media, online marketplaces) and domains. Rank the risks in order of significance to determine an appropriate response plan.

 

 

Best Practice #2: Establishing a regulatory and legal foundation

Intellectual property is protected by law. However, to give yourself the best legal protection possible, it’s imperative to register your trademarks, copyrights, and patents in your target markets. If possible, you should go one step further and secure your rights worldwide.

 

Such a basis provides you with an excellent starting ground against IP fraud. Once that’s in place, develop your internal checklist for dealing with infringement. For example, you can create a blueprint for your takedown mechanisms, describe your partnership with relevant authorities, both national and international, and outline the specific steps to follow in case you take legal action against fraudsters.

 

This also includes an escalation process you can follow when urgent threats arise. Such a checklist allows you to act calmly and effectively, even in the midst of an IP crisis.

 

 

Best Practice #3: Implementing technology and tools

A comprehensive online brand protection program requires software tools that are tailored to detect and eliminate all kinds of threats against your IP rights. A wide variety of brand monitoring platforms are available for this purpose.

 

On the one hand, there are monitoring tools that specialize in detecting and specifically targeting counterfeits, gray market products, knock-offs, and all other types of IP infringements on platforms, online marketplaces, and social media.

 

Then there are also tools that analyze domains, meta descriptions, and HTML codes to detect IP infringements. With the help of these tools, you can take precise action against threats such as cybersquatting, typosquatting, phishing, and brand impersonation.

 

Instead of domains, reverse image searches and web crawlers are aimed at detecting fraudulent images online. These can be stolen or copied product pictures on marketplaces, fake ads on social media, and much more. An example of this type of tool is infrimage, a user-friendly software that creates a database of your recent searches and results. This historic feature provides a wealth of data that’s invaluable for continuous monitoring and case management, and is much more effective than repeatedly performing individual reverse image searches.

 

 

Presentation of a continuous image search created in infrimage, with search results, filters for the search results, comprehensive statistics, and an action menu for further actions such as test purchases, enforcement, and further investigation.       

 

 

Specific anti-counterfeit technologies, like holograms and digital signatures, are a great tool for helping consumers identify genuine products. SCRIBOS, for example, creates temper-proof physical and digital product markings that empower users to tell genuine articles from fakes.

 

globaleyez and SCRIBOS have realized the importance of integrating online and offline resources to best protect our clients’ IP rights. Collecting, analyzing, and acting upon data stemming from SCRIBOS’ product markings is a great way to integrate online and offline brand protection measures.

 

 

Best Practice #4: Developing internal processes

Just like educating your consumers, training your employees about how to deal with counterfeiting issues is a must. In their case, however, the focus should be on identifying risks and responding by triggering the appropriate process(es).

 

Speaking of those, interdepartmental coordination is crucial when it comes to addressing the problem. This is especially important for larger companies where information can get lost between departments, costing your brand precious time. Several departments need to be involved and work together seamlessly to successfully address counterfeiting issues, including IT, marketing, legal, supply chain, and fraud prevention.

 

Create standard incident response workflows for emerging issues, and make sure to involve your brand protection provider in these as well for maximum efficiency.

 

 

Best Practice #5: Measuring success

As counterfeit threats continuously evolve and multiply, measuring success is important for you to recognize whether your responses are working and how to further tweak them for even better results.

 

There are several key performance indicators (KPIs) that can help you measure how successful your actions are. The number of takedowns executed, for example, can be a good start. However, bear in mind that the principle of quality over quantity is valid here as well. Eliminating a large number of smaller threats is much less effective than eliminating the one seller that causes you the most harm. Therefore, it’s advisable to compare the number of takedowns against the actual negative impact fraudulent sellers have on your brand.

 

Find out why successful brands avoid mass takedowns!

 

Another useful KPI is the fluctuation of the number of counterfeit listings over time. This helps you determine the long-term success of your measures. A reduction in numbers indicates that your responses are effective in the long term, resulting in a clean marketplace where your product listings appear without the distortion of fraudulent listings.

 

 

Symbolic image depicting employees collecting and analyzing KPIs in the form of graphs and diagrams

 

 

Customer trust and brand sentiment metrics are also heavily affected by counterfeiting problems. If your customers have doubts about the originality of your products, their trust in your brand will diminish. But once you correctly address the issue and reduce the risk of running into fake products, these metrics will rise again.

 

You should also measure the ROI of your brand protection program. Compare its costs against the gains you realize via counterfeit seizures that result in increasing sales of original products, damages paid after legal procedures you win against fraudsters, and improving brand sentiment metrics.

 

Learn why fraudsters must reimburse you for the costs of brand protection measures taken

 

Your KPIs, as well as a constant threat evaluation process, create a solid basis for continuously improving your brand protection measures.

 

 

Best Practice #6: Actionable recommendations

Expert advice is imperative for a functioning online brand protection program. Run a maturity assessment on your current program to detect potential areas of improvement. Make adjustments if you need to.

 

For example, identify quick wins (e.g., domain protection or high-risk marketplace monitoring) and get started with them while you build the foundations of your long-term goals. Select and invest in scalable tools that can adapt to your exact needs and evolve with your brand. Work with trusted partners to stay ahead of threats and address them as they emerge.

 

 

Conclusion

In today’s digital-first economy, setting up a comprehensive online brand protection program is a must to protect your IP rights against the devastating threats of counterfeiting, grey markets, and more.

 

Bear in mind that online brand protection is not a project you can do once and be done with it. As threats evolve and new cases of infringement emerge, you need to keep the program running to stay on top of the situation and eliminate threats as they appear. But the time, energy, and resources you spend on your online brand protection program will return to you as increasing consumer trust, intact brand reputation, and diminished loss of revenue due to IP infringements.

 

Contact us if you’d like to explore professional online brand protection solutions, or if you have any questions about protecting your IP rights both online and offline.