Protecting your brand online includes detecting and taking action to stop unauthorized use of your online brand name, logo and messaging. In other words, trademark protection attempts to stop misuse of your trademark on the Internet. Registering a trademark for your trademark will be considered trademark protection because by registering you can take legal action against anyone who copies your trademark or uses your trademark without permission. So it makes sense that a law firm that helps companies register their trademarks might also offer trademark protection services. Unfortunately, law firms often don’t have the trademark protection software they need to detect online counterfeiting on the web. Digital brand protection tools based on machine learning can evaluate tens of millions of websites every day—something teams of lawyers can’t do.
A brand name makes it easier for consumers to recognize and remember a company and hopefully leads to positive perceptions of the quality of the company’s information, products or services. In other words, a brand does have value because we know we all have a preference for certain brands because we trust them and expect a certain quality. Online brand protection is important because brand reputation influences consumers’ purchasing decisions, which in turn affects a company’s sales and growth. As Cox Enterprises vice president and chief information security officer David McLeod said during the panel discussion, “There is a lot of research showing that revenue growth is not driven by negative sentiment.” It’s the brand not being tarnished that’s the accelerator. How do I keep my brand clean if I don’t control where it’s used?” For more from David on this topic, watch the video below in the Online Brand Protection KPIs section.
At least part, if not most, of your brand value is the trust you build with your customers, and that’s what online scammers try to take advantage of. Online brand abuse or brand identity comes in the form of fake websites, fake social media accounts, fake mobile apps, fake online advertisements, etc. “False” here means that the owner or manufacturer of the online property pretends to be a brand he trusts and does not have permission to use it. The reason scammers bother to impersonate your brand is that even if they don’t own your brand, they can benefit from its value.
They make money by leveraging your brand, using it to convince victims to give up their credentials, payment details, etc. Again, this will cost you money, although it’s a bit out of your control. It costs you lost revenue/sales, fraud, investigation and response costs, lost customer reimbursements, decreased customer satisfaction, lost customers, and damaged brand and reputation—yes, many of these costs are intertwined and multiplied. Misusing your brand online can cost you, so it’s important to prevent it with brand protection.
BluePear is a brand protection software solution that has been helping brands protect against fraudulent affiliates for over a decade. It has saved over 50 clients over $1 million in payments to fraudulent affiliates. The service is open to brands of any size and from any geographical location. To get an idea of how much money BluePear can save you, you can visit the website and use the handy calculator to input your search queries and CPA rate. Additionally, the cost of the service depends on the frequency of monitoring and the number of keywords used.
Once you are ready to get started, a personal manager will be assigned to you and they will take care of the setup process. All you need to do is inform the manager of the keywords, search engines, devices and geographical locations you wish to monitor. If you do not have a list of keywords, the BluePear team can create one for you. Once the monitoring is complete, you will receive comprehensive reports detailing the ads, links, and landing pages that were used.
Additionally, if you enjoy using BluePear and want to recommend it to your friends, you can do so through the referral program and earn rewards.
Online brand abuse or brand identity comes in the form of fake websites, fake social media accounts, fake mobile apps, fake online advertisements, etc. Digital brand protection tools like BluePear based on machine learning can evaluate tens of millions of websites every day, so it is up for you what to choose.