Adotas

Where media buyers start online

Featured Author

Mike Denning is vice-president and general manager of VeriSign, a leading provider of intelligent infrastructure that enables and products the world's networked transactions. Denning manages VeriSign's Digital Brand Management Service and helps clients manage their digital assets.

More articles by Mike Denning





Features

Defending Your Brand Online: Five Assumptions Marketers Should Avoid when Building Trust and Brand Equity

Written on
Oct 16, 2006 
Author
Mike Denning  |
Share
Defending Your Brand Online: Five Assumptions Marketers Should Avoid when Building Trust and Brand Equity


Assumption #2: Online security doesn’t affect consumer confidence in a brand.
As consumers become more educated about security concerns online, marketing professionals should, too — and use it to their advantage. A recent report by the CMO Council called, “Secure the Trust of Your Brand: How Security and IT Integrity Influence Corporate Brands,” found that only 29 percent of companies had crisis communication plans in place in the event of a security or data breach, despite the fact that nearly 60 percent of marketing respondents said that improving the security and technology that underlies a brand boosts its value. Meanwhile, phishing attacks and other online scams continue to multiply.

What you can do: Make sure that Marketing, Branding, or both are represented in security planning and that your company has a crisis plan ready for when a breach occurs. Encourage employees and customers to report suspected fraud. Make it easy for them by providing easy-to-use fraud-reporting tools. When your company launches new security measures to protect important data, let customers and employees know as part of your overall communication strategy.

Assumption #3: It’s OK to ignore social media.
Most marketing professionals have sophisticated online marketing programs in place, but many of them underestimate how easy it is for negative consumer or industry sentiment to affect their brands — literally overnight in some cases. With millions of websites, chat rooms, and blogs, detractors have the potential to use your organization’s most precious asset — your brand — as a doormat, cause celebre, or trophy.

What you can do: Evaluate customized blog monitoring and reporting services. That’s what Marriott International did. Marriott launched a new program offering bloggers advance news in the hopes of winning them over, and started monitoring blogs to see what was being said about the company. (Read about it here) Customized monitoring and reporting services provide news and alerts from thousands of sources including specialized trade publications and international publications. Search engines and free tools don’t provide that depth of coverage.

Assumption #4: Your technology or legal team has registered all the appropriate domain names for a product launch or ad campaign.
Are you sure your domain names are registered for your next brand or product launch? Better check. It’s a common mistake to assume the correct domain names have been registered for a brand or product launch, only to discover at the last minute that they are registered to someone else or have been snapped up by speculators who’ve heard about an upcoming announcement in the media or through other sources.

A related mistake is registering only a single variation of a product or service name in the “.com” extension, without considering the potential global audience that may use international search engines and local country extensions. A recent study from Forrester estimates that 38 percent of all website traffic now comes from direct navigation — a significant audience that should not be ignored (Source: Forrester Research, Inc.).

What you can do: A quick investigation can help you find out how your customers find you. Make sure your key brands, products and services are registered in country-specific extensions, such as “.co.uk” for the United Kingdom or “.br” for Brazil. Find out what happens if a consumer types a common misspelling of your brand name into a Web browser. Are they redirected to your site or do they find an unrelated parked page with loads of ads from competitors? Do a search through a country-specific search engine site, such as Google.de, to see what companies are listed first.

Assumption #5: Websites and email are 100 hundred percent reliable.
When it comes to online brand protection, many marketing professionals give only passing glance to website and email availability, assuming that their IT department has it under control. But even some of the largest global companies still rely on a single geographic location or Internet service provider to host their critical Internet systems. If those systems are the victim of natural or manmade disasters or accidents, you can lose millions of dollars in online revenue can in minutes due to website unavailability. Plus, critical communications with customers may be lost or delayed.

What you can do: Meet with your IT team to see that your company has a redundant global network and enough backup to ensure that Internet systems are always up. Not sure what that entails? Spend more time thinking about DNS infrastructure and options for enterprise companies, particularly if much of your business is done online. It’s worth the investment.





Reader Comments.

bad credit home equity loans bad credit home equity loans

Posted by bad credit home equity loans | 5:51 am on November 8, 2006.

Leave a Comment

Add a comment

Pages: « previous page 1 2

Tags: , and
Article Sponsor

More Features


  • Are you taking advantage of Twitter's new geolocation service?
    View Results

    Loading ... Loading ...

Polls Archive

Latest News

News Archive

Spotlight

AdBidCentral’s CEO, Vivek Veeraraghavan Talks Openly*What was the inspiration to start AdBidCentral? The conditions that inspired AdBidCentral came from a variety of factors in my personal [...] more...

Adotas Partnership