How to protect your brand identity in 5 easy ways

Scammers are always finding new ways to profit off 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:

• What is brand identity
• Why is it important to protect your brand identity
• Easy steps to protect your brand identity
• How Red Points can help automate the entire process 

What is brand identity?

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. 

An effective brand identity 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. 

Why is it important to protect your brand identity?

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 efforts you have invested in marketing and positioning your brand. 

Infringers can create fake accounts and 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 can have severe consequences for your brand, including:

• Tarnished brand reputation
• Loss of customer trust 
• Loss of revenue
• Complicated tax disputes due to impersonated company names similar to yours

How to protect your brand identity

1- Claim your intellectual property right

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 you brand:

• Trademark: A registered trademark can help separate your brand from your competitors. You can start by trademarking the name of your brand to ensure no one else can use the same name. It’s also recommended to trademark your product names, when they are rather unique and not general in any way. For instance, Kleenex and Band-Aid are both trademarked due to their unique product names
• Patent: With patents, you are able to protect your unique inventions from being recreated and copied by your competitors. If your product uses innovative technology or a unique design idea, it’s recommended to get a patent before you even launch your products in the market. Your designs and innovations can set you completely apart from your competition and patenting them gives you the legal right to shut down any competitors who try to blatantly copy you.
• Copyright: With copyright, you get the exclusive right to copy and distribute your creative work (digital or physical). For instance, you can copyright your brand’s official product images and other graphics to ensure scammers don’t copy them and use them to sell fake products.
• Domain name: Your brand’s domain name is also a part of the brand identity, which is why you need to actively protect it. More than just a simple website address, it’s the entry point for your business. Squatters can buy domains with the same name as yours but a different extension to either sell it back to you at a higher price or set up a fake website. 

2- Profile management

With your intellectual property protected, the next step 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 lookout for fake social media pages and websites that are trying to copy your brand identity and make money off of it. 

3- Fight against business identity theft

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. 

4- Establish clear brand guidelines

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. 

5- Automate brand identity protection

When you are already too busy building your brand from the ground up, spending hours trying to find and track down scammers can get too overwhelming and time-consuming.

Red Points makes the entire process easier with its impersonation removal software that 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. 

What’s next

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 brand protection can help protect your brand identity.