The digital world, including digital marketing and the digitization of business operations, means you have to re-think your brand protection strategies.

Corporate brand is a fragile thing. Without properly monitoring your digital footprint, your customer journey, and the web at large for fraudulent activities that could impact your brand, you are undermining your brand footprint.

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

  • Increasingly, 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 in place to safeguard “authorized” digital platforms. Marketing likely tracks your broader online brand presence through social media tools or social media monitoring tools. But, if it hasn’t happen already, this type of approach typically results in a preventable cleanup from an incident that blindsided you.

Digital Risk Management solutions facilitate proactive and preventative Brand Protection.

Digital Risk Management 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?

  1. Monitor for references to customer-facing digital channels on surface, social, deep, and dark web.
  2. Perform sentiment analysis on digital customer journeys.
  3. Expand insight into deep and dark web activities to help anticipate cyber attacks that could result in the loss of personally identifiable information.
  4. Perform sentiment analysis and monitor corporate social channels to anticipate and mitigate negativity and other issues.
  5. Improve visibility on social media, online reviews, blogs, and ratings by monitoring the un-indexed web (such as blog comments) as well as your traditional social channels.
  6. Monitor surface, social, deep, and dark web for brand imitators using sophisticated tools that can identify both brand terminology as well as imagery.
  7. Use artificial intelligence and image recognition technology to find off-label or stolen goods for sale on digital channels.

The bottom line is this: you need a strategy, driven from a digital governance directive, for Brand Protection that includes social media, supply chain, employees, customer care, and incident response in order to maintain and build a positive brand.