Defending Your Brand Online: Five Assumptions Marketers Should Avoid when Building Trust and Brand Equity
It’s a sad but familiar tale: The marketing team at a global company works for months on the launch of a new product, only to find out after the fact that phishers and fraudsters are pulling their customers away, their profits down, and their reputation into the gutter.
It happens more often than you’d think. That’s because most marketing and brand teams — busy with building brand recognition and product awareness — haven’t focused on aggressively defending their brands online. What’s more, they and their Legal/IP departments usually lack the tools needed to fend off sophisticated electronic fraudsters, whose ghost attacks on their brands can strike and disappear before anyone can take action.
The good news is that this doesn’t have to happen. You can sidestep the common mistakes that erode brand equity and consumer trust. Below are five common assumptions to avoid — and how to do it instead.
Assumption #1: Free search tools or search engines will find all the information required to understand how your brand is perceived online.
Although search engines and other free search tools are a great starting point for finding out what people think about your brand or organization, they can’t provide the depth and relevance of specialized products that reach the far-flung corners of the Internet. Free search tools don’t let you rank for relevance to a brand, search for logo and image misuse or abuse, comb through public instant messages and chat sessions, or monitor millions of domain names and thousands of spam feeds for virtual or physical threats. They don’t have the power to track incidents over time or react to crises quickly and comprehensively.
What you can do: Get involved in protecting your brand’s online presence. You can’t leave brand reputation monitoring to an intern and a search engine. Even your Legal/IP team can’t do it alone. They can be the first line of defense, but there is no substitute for a specialized, automated system that combines human analysis, ongoing incident tracking, and abuse/misuse identification throughout the Internet. There are products and services at every price range, and the annual cost is generally less than a single marketing initiative for the average large company.
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