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Scammers are always finding new ways to profit from the brand identity of successful businesses. They can divert traffic to fake websites, sell counterfeit products, or even steal sensitive information from your prospective customers — all of which can severely affect your brand identity and reputation.
To avoid this, you need to constantly monitor and protect your brand identity. In this article, we discuss:
Brand identity refers to the visible elements of a brand like its name, symbol, design, colors, or any other features that help customers differentiate the brand’s products or services from all of its competitors.
Effective brand identity protection increases brand recognition and reputation by helping your customers understand the difference between real and fake products.
For instance, Nike’s lone swoosh logo is one of the most recognizable brand logos in the world. Just seeing a swoosh symbol on a pair of shoes or t-shirt is enough for people to know that those products are by Nike.
Your brand promises a particular experience to your customers through the brand identity that you establish. This can include a wide range of factors like high quality, exclusive design, and impeccable customer service.
But if your brand identity isn’t protected, someone else could copy you and take advantage of all the time and effort you have invested in marketing and positioning your brand.
Infringers can create fake accounts and duplicate websites under your brand’s name to sell counterfeit products, access customers’ financial details, or set up fake companies under your name. Business identity theft of any kind and the lack of brand identity protection can have severe consequences for your brand, including:
Claiming your intellectual property (IP) provides you with legal protection for important parts of your brand identity, including your brand name, logo, domain name, and even product designs.
With an IP, you gain more control over how your brand is projected in the market and it also stops others from getting a free ride on the back of your brand’s success.
Here are the different ways you can protect the intellectual property of your brand:
With your intellectual property protected, the next step for protecting brand identity is to constantly monitor your brand online. Scammers can create fake social media pages similar to yours and imitate your brand identity just to confuse unsuspecting customers. Cybersquatters can also register a domain similar to yours with just a small typo to avoid getting taken down due to copyright.
It’s crucial to consistently look for fake social media pages and websites that are trying to copy your brand identity and make money off of it.
When you do find scammers and bad actors trying to impersonate your brand, you need to actively fight against identity theft and report them.
If these scammers are operating fake websites, you can send them a cease-and-desist letter or file a UDRP complaint against them. In case the scammers have created fake social media profiles, you can file complaints with the respective social media platforms to take the pages down. Getting trademarks and copyrights can help you immensely in taking down bad actors quickly.
Your brand identity is the visual representation of your company. It’s how people perceive you and your products. If you partner with distributors and retailers to sell your products, you need to make sure they represent your brand the same way that you do. You can share brand guideline documents with them and explicitly mention the kind of colors, product images, taglines, logo, social media content, and web copy that they should use for your products.
When you are already too busy building your brand from the ground up, spending hours trying to find and track down scammers to protect your brand identity can get too overwhelming and time-consuming.
Red Points makes the entire brand identity protection process easier with its Brand Abuse Monitoring and Impersonation Removal Software which can automatically find and remove fake accounts, apps, websites, and domains to protect your brand identity and reputation.
The tool uses bot-powered search to scan the internet 24/7 for any kind of brand impersonation. It also actively reviews and analyses impersonation, and stops it through automatic enforcement.
Instead of waiting for your brand identity to get compromised and then fight against scammers, you should take proactive steps to avoid identity theft altogether. Get in touch to see how Red Points can help protect your brand identity.