England,July 30th,2024-Brand protection is what guarantees its future. We’ll explain how to use it and why you need it.
What is Brand Protection?
In simple terms, it’s a remedy against defamation, bad-mood reviews, copyright infringement, copycatting, and other unpleasant nuances that can sabotage your integrity and reputation.
In the early stages it’s possible to keep track of things happening around your business firsthand. But as your brand grows bigger and attracts more clientele, it all can get too hasty. You simply won’t be able to make sure no one isn’t trying to be your enemy or second-rate doppelganger.
This is why it’s a good idea to use a Bluepear tool that sniffs around the Web and reports all types of business abuse. So, what are we going to tackle exactly?
1. Shield your reputation
According to GE Capital Retail Bank 81% of online shoppers research brands prior to clicking the ‘Buy’ button. Averagely, a research takes a whooping span of 79 days (!) before an important purchase is finally validated inside a buyer’s thrifty mind.
Negative reviews have a fat chance to scare off potential customers. Now, it’s perfectly normal to have a certain percentage of dissatisfied clients — even big names have those! And according to Britain’s YouGov bureau they somehow don’t always change brands they are unhappy with.
The best strategy in this case is to:
- Locate. Find all negative mentions of your company possible in every nook and corner of the Web. It’s hard to do it manually, of course, since you’ll be digging through dozens of browser pages. But once you locate them, you can get the picture of why clients can be unhappy with you.
- Address. Now that you know who’s complaining and why, offer them your support. Personalized and caring. As Zendesk reports, client support on a personal level leads to a higher customer retention.
Never try to silence and censor unhappy commentators. First, it’s not nice at all. Second, it can trigger the so-called Streisand Effect when something forcefully deleted from the Internett reapers online in a caboodle of new instances.
Of course, some customers can be angry for no viable reason. In this case, you can show the rest of the viewers that you’ve done all you could to right the wrongs and pepper it with a pinch of healthy satire.
2. Guard you trademark
Sadly, every brand that is worth something has clones. In 2024 a whole bouquet of Twitter lookalikes has blossomed: Mastodon, Threads, etc. And Crumbl has had a legal bout with Dirty Dough who pretty much copied their business formula. (And even stole their recipes.)
Your brand will face the same issues. Especially, if you’re paving a way in a niche industry where every new move can be a key to success. And there are numerous ways to copy you, actually.
For starters, they can plagiarize your brand name by slightly altering it: inserting weird symbols, changing the order of letters, employing homonyms, and so on. In other words, anything to have a”unique” name, but still sound exactly like you.
Then, trademark abuse will focus on other strategies. First, they’ll most likely try to hijack your URL. In other words, it’ll be a web-address that will scarily look like the URL of your genuine website. The practice is also known as URL spoofing and it’s often adopted by scammers — dishonest competitors aren’t picky either, you see.
Second, it’s probable they’ll resort to brand bidding. It’s a more subtle approach centered around search-engine optimization (a.k.a. SEO). People will find your store, website, or platform by specific keywords. Your brand’s name is also a keyword specific to your niche or industry. Rivals will insert the name of the brand into their ads and redirect online traffic — that is rightfully yours — to their own web outlets.
Finally, It’s also possible to do ads hijacking. This is when a rival’s advertising is artfully designed to mimic your own. Everything counts in this case: from a similar logo to a familiar-sounding name. And even the color palette and fonts play a major role! Sometimes more complex tricks — basically fraud-related — can be used. Like Javascript injections: people clicking on your website will be intercepted by a script instructing them to go elsewhere.
3. Filter all related content
At some point your brand can get coverage. Publicity is always good, as long as it’s not contradictory, pejorative, or just unfavorable. To avoid that, you need to closely monitor what kind of content pops up online mentioning your brand.
For example, if you make some kind of high-quality play dough from organic materials, you don’t want to discover that it’s used to replicate people’s fingerprints for hacking — it doesn’t align with your brand’s philosophy and mission. Or if you make a soft drink free of refined sugar with natural juice added, you don’t want it to be compared to a cheaper soda that charges a smaller price just because they use junky ingredients.
Again, it will take some elbow grease as you’ll need to monitor forums akin to Reddit or Yelp, YouTube where new and upcoming products are often tested, and other outlets like Weebly or Medium where people share their opinion via blogs.
In the Web some content may:
- Violate your ethical values.
- Misrepresent your product.
- Deliberately spread misinformation.
So your job will be responding to it asap. Remember: every forum is a public arena where you can defend your honor. And to win this gladiatorial battle, you need to be absolutely honest about your product — honesty and genuineness is what attracts people the most.
Make Your Brand Look Grand
We hope our tips will help you build a solid presence of your brand online. As long as you make a great product, you don’t have to worry about libels or clones. And specialized tools will help you avoid lots of reputation-related issues.
Media info:
Website: https://bluepear.net/
Email: sales@bluepear.co
Address: 175 Darkes Lane, Brosnan House, Suite 2b, Potters Bar, England, EN6 1BW
