7 Steps to Facilitate Brand Protection

Monitoring your external threat landscape and taking on brand protection correctly

Corporate brand is a fragile thing. Without properly monitoring your external threat landscape and taking on brand protection correctly, your customer journey, and the web at large for fraudulent activities that could impact your brand. You are probably in the midst of a rapid digital transformation. Are you unwittingly undermining your brand footprint and allowing threat actors to exploit blind spots?

The increasing digitization of all business units creates new considerations for brand protection.

• Companies rely on new digital channels to expand customer-facing business operations.
• Digital tools such as online platforms and apps create new forms of customer journeys that need managing in order to maintain customer service expectations.
• Companies maintain customer data and personally identifiable information on digital platforms, making it vulnerable to cyber attacks and loss.
• Social media channels elevate customer expectations and increase brand transparency.
• Social media, online reviews, blogs, and ratings elevate the role of the customer in brand reputation.
• Customers are bombarded with messages and ads from trusted, reliable as well as fraudulent sources.
• Affordable access to digital marketing tools makes it easy for bad actors to imitate, confuse, or sabotage corporate brands.
• Brands with valuable products and protected IP face the risk fraud on a regular basis and, when it occurs, customers suffer the consequences of off-label products accessed easily on digital channels, which hurts corporate brand.

Brand protection is all too often reactive. Likely your cyber team has some program to proactively detect cyber threats. Marketing likely monitors and tracks social media engagement. However, the tools they use are not looking at your organization from an threat actors perspective. This this type of approach to intelligence typically results in a preventable cost, disruption and reputation loss from an incident that blindsided you.

Security intelligence solutions facilitate proactive and preventative brand intelligence.

Security intelligence solutions for brand protection offer a way to for you and your team to be proactive and preventative. Keeping a pulse on not only social media – what people say, sentiment, etc. – but also surface, deep, and dark web expands your visibility into direct and indirect threats to your brand. It also improves your ability to anticipate unknown threats.

What can you do to be proactive with brand protection?

• Recognize you need a risk-based inventory of assets – presence, brands, products, etc.
• Proactively discover external events and correlate the risk to your organization.
• Protect your brand from abuse on social media and the surface web.
• Quickly detect and communicate typo squatting and phishing attacks.
• Detect and respond to negative and breaking events on social media.
• Identify and mitigate emerging tactics targeting your brand and industry.
• Distribute brand intelligence to other stakeholders to improve resiliency across the organization.

The bottom line is this: you need a strategy, driven from a digital governance directive, for brand intelligence that includes coverage on your digital assets, employees, supply chain, customers and external events in order to maintain and build a positive brand.