The e-commerce industry is expected to hit about $6.54 trillion by next year, and the brands that succeed exceptionally well in today’s global market are those that prioritize a list of things. One of which is brand protection – protecting their interest and their customer’s trust. A brand that customers can easily identify, trust, and connect with is the type that will go far in business.
This is mostly because those are some of the requirements necessary to compete and easily dominate the market. And securing your customer’s trust and your digital assets can usually be achieved through brand protection.
Having a great online presence also has to do with dealing with the many challenges that may arise. These challenges can range from intellectual property theft to impersonation and the manufacturing of fake products.
This practice not only hurts your brand finances and reduces the marketability and profitability of your products, but it can also hurt your customers as well as they may be consuming very low-standard products unknowingly.
Hence, protecting your brand is beneficial to both your business and the health of your customers.
What is Brand Protection?
Brand protection can be defined as the security measures taken to safeguard an online business. The process largely involves measures that prevent theft of intellectual properties (such as business name, logo, product design and idea), copyright piracy, counterfeiting, and infringement.
It is believed that doing this can prevent a lot of problems, including damage to the brand’s reputation, loss of customer’s trust, and decline in sales and revenue. And some of the ways by which brand protection can be ensured include the following:
- Through the registration of intellectual properties and rights
- Monitoring brand digital assets across different social media platforms and websites
- Creating constant brand awareness
- Enforcing non-disclosure agreements (NDA) with bu
- siness partners and associates
How is Brand Protection Important in Your Business’s Performance?
There are several benefits of brand protection, and the most notable ones are:
- To Prevent Damage To brand Reputation
In today’s digital space, a brand’s reputation is everything. A study recently stated that 91% of all customers buy from brands they respect and trust, and most times, this is born out of a shiny reputation.
This means that dirt on a brand’s reputation can spell incurable consequences in the long run. Hence, brands must protect themselves to keep their reputation intact and the sales coming.
- To Win Investors Over
Investment is the backbone of all business, and the money that brands need to manufacture goods and services usually comes from investors. It has been proven that investors only gravitate towards brands with reputable images. This is understandable to prevent loss and maximize profit.
Businesses that must win investors, therefore, have to take very good care of their online reputation.
- To Protect Profit
If there is a counterfeit product, in your name, in the market, it will greatly affect how much of your product you market. This is because a percentage of your customers would have patronized the impostors. The resulting decrease in sales is enough to dwindle your profit and cripple your business if something is not done quickly.
Hence, to prevent your profit from declining, it is a must to protect your brand at all times.
- To Prevent Waste of Resources
Battling intellectual property theft is a rigorous process that demands time, money and energy. Brands that lose some of their assets to unscrupulous individuals on the internet end up fighting more legal battles than actually doing any business.
This takes valuable resources from the company’s pocket and may even take the brand out of the market if the battle is lost.
Main Challenges of Brand Protection
Protecting your brand is not an entirely easy task, and you may likely be confronted with any of the following challenges:
- Cost
Brand protection is not cheap. It requires money to register intellectual properties and set up regular monitoring for all your digital assets. The cost may vary. However, it may sometimes cost more than new businesses, or small companies can afford.
Also, there is the need for experts who can properly ensure brand protection. This may require hiring a professional – a cost that smaller enterprises may not have in their tiny budget.
- Scalability
A proper proxy protection strategy must be strong enough to scale up to defend the brand on all sides, and because new cases of theft occur every day, it is important to have a strategy that can easily be scaled to handle these.
Also, the monitoring may need to occur on new platforms, and it can be challenging to find a single strategy that can easily handle old and new threats.
- Geo-Restrictions
This is perhaps the biggest injustice of brand protection as it can stop several brands from protecting their company in some parts of the internet known as restricted websites.
This means that theft can be happening in one part of the world, yet a brand would be unable to stop it because they do not have access to that part of the web.
How Proxies Can Be Used to Solve These Challenges
Proxies play a very vital role in ensuring smooth brand protection. The process is better proactive than reactive, as we have seen above. It also needs to be automatic to reduce the workload and make it more effective. These are some of the reasons why it is best to use proxies in protecting your brand.
A proper proxy can easily automate brand protection while easily scaling through all the above challenges. For instance, a Canadian brand looking to protect itself in Australia can use a proxy Australia and bypass restrictions, scale up to handle new threats, and save overall cost. Learn more about using a proxy Australia.
Conclusion
To lose any part of your brand is a painful process that no company wants to go through. Hence, protecting a brand is a full-time commitment. There are a few challenges that a brand may encounter on this journey, but they can be easily mitigated using the best proxies.