Every day, businesses big and small depend on digital channels like social media accounts, mobile apps, and email newsletters to grow brand awareness and thrive in the digital age. But these opportunities come with brand risk. Brand impersonation attacks and other forms of fraud increasingly threaten brand integrity, with nearly half of small businesses reporting a cyberattack in 2023.
Fortunately, as new threats emerge, so do useful security strategies to neutralize them. Learn what brand protection is, why you need it, and how to create an effective brand protection strategy—with advice from a legal expert working on the front lines of intellectual property defense.
What is brand protection?
Brand protection is a combination of preventative techniques and responsive strategies to combat brand abuse—an umbrella term referring to the misappropriation of your business’s brand by third parties attempting to fraudulently target and profit from your customers.
“Once a brand has some traction and is becoming popular, it often happens that bad actors come in,” says Jessica Cohen-Nowak, an intellectual property attorney and of counsel at Fish & Richardson PC. “They set up their own seller accounts on various ecommerce platforms to try and trade off the goodwill that you just built up with your consumers.” These bad actors are also called impersonators, Jessica notes, and their conduct often qualifies as intellectual property infringement, which can give you significant legal recourse—brand protection.
What threats do brands face?
- Counterfeit goods
- Gray market selling
- Cybersquatting
- Website spoofing
- Impersonation and phishing
- Content piracy
There’s no shortage of threats brands face in the digital era. Here are some of the most prevalent threats today:
Counterfeit goods
Product counterfeiting is one of the more well-known forms of brand abuse. It might involve two different brand infringements: trademark or copyright (and sometimes both). In trademark infringement, an imitator might use your brand’s logo on their product—either a low-quality, cheaper-to-produce version of what you make or something completely different than anything your business produces. In copyright infringement, an imitator steals your trade dress—your brand’s distinctive characteristics—and proprietary design with or without your trademark attached, and sells the counterfeit product.
Both infringements threaten your brand’s integrity, especially when customers confuse the fake products for your legitimate products and blame your business for the poor quality.
Gray market selling
Gray market selling, also known as parallel importing, traffics your authentic, non-counterfeit products through unauthorized channels. Unauthorized sellers undercut authorized distribution channels, destabilize your pricing strategies, and reduce profit margins for authorized industry partners.
Because you have no oversight around how and where your products are being sold, products might fail to meet local safety or regulatory standards or lack property warranty coverage. Faulty customer service from the unauthorized seller could also be erroneously attributed to your business.
Cybersquatting
Cybersquatters register or use a domain name similar to your brand with the intent of profiting off your brand’s reputation. Oftentimes these cybercriminals use “typosquatting,” a form of cybersquatting that involves registering a domain name with a slightly misspelled version of your legitimate brand name.
Cybersquatting risks include diversion of customer web traffic, unauthorized collection of sensitive customer information, distribution of malware from fake sites (which customers may attribute to your legitimate brand), and ultimately, lost sales of otherwise genuinely interested customers.
Website spoofing
Website spoofing is often associated with cybersquatting, but instead involves the creation of fraudulent web assets that mimic those of a legitimate brand. Imposters can achieve this by typosquatting similar domains (e.g., using a .net domain instead of .com or swapping similar letter combinations, like “rn” and “m”), or through more technical methods, like DNS cache poisoning to redirect traffic to third-party sites, URL encoding tricks to hide real destinations, or SSL certificate manipulation.
The impact of spoofing on a brand can be devastating: erosion of customer trust, financial losses, potential regulatory compliance issues, and even legal action.
Impersonation and phishing
In impersonation and phishing attacks, a malicious third party acts as a representative of your brand to trick customers into disclosing sensitive information or conducting fraudulent transactions. The bad actor may use your brand to create fake social media accounts, mobile apps, promotions or giveaways, or email campaigns to steal customer credentials.
“What they’re really doing is just looking for financial information—personal information from customers,” Jessica warns. “The best way to prevent that is to have strong trademarks and registrations so you can fight that.”
Content piracy
Content piracy involves the unauthorized use of your brand’s creative works—YouTube videos, Instagram photos, product captions, etc.—usually in an effort to repurpose them for the sale of unrelated goods or services, or to trick customers into thinking they’re interacting with your business.
Content piracy is often an element of other brand abuse tactics. Thieves can use tools like artificial intelligence to pirate brand content, like social media videos and product images, and use them on spoofed websites, phishing emails, or fraudulent ads, for example.
How to ensure your brand is protected
- Rely on trademark enforcement
- Make strategic branding choices
- Prioritize brand monitoring
- Invest in comprehensive digital security and transparency
There are many brand protection efforts you can employ—some of which, Jessica notes, are best pursued with a legal professional familiar with intellectual property rights. But early stage entrepreneurs without a lot of time or capital to spare can still pursue some of these brand production solutions:
Rely on trademark enforcement
Once you’ve decided on a brand name for your business—depending on how unique it is, and the extent to which brand abuse is a threat in your niche—you should consider trademarking it.
Jessica stresses that trademark enforcement is one of the best responsive measures to protect against brand abuse. She says registering your trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) can help when filing IP infringement or digital platforms abuse reports—often the first step toward combating impersonators and getting the offending accounts removed.
Jessica says that if you have trademark registration, you’ll have more options for combatting these kinds of threats. “You can also seek relief in court,” she says. “I would always consult a lawyer to do that, but it’s the stuff upfront that helps you have more options for fighting that type of attack.”
Make strategic branding choices
Trademark protections are universally available to all brand owners, Jessica says, noting that generic terms are not typically considered registrable. “The USPTO wants to see distinctive terms,” she says.
Trademarking your brand requires proving that your brand name is distinctive to examiners at the USPTO. If it’s not, you can prove that its generic descriptiveness is based on market recognition: “It’s not something typically new brands can do, because you have to show that it’s essentially become famous, that it has a really strong place in the marketplace, and that consumers recognize it. … That’s a big hurdle.”
Instead, Jessica advises that early stage entrepreneurs focus on selecting a strategically unique brand name—something easier to trademark from the beginning. Opting for a generic brand name adds a layer of difficulty, even if you can eventually prove that it’s you. Jessica explains, “You want it to be easy if something really serious happens that could put your customers in some sort of peril or scam.”
Prioritize brand monitoring
There are plenty of digital tools available on the market to help your business track brand mentions and usage across the internet. Though Jessica advises it’s best to use such brand protection services through a qualified attorney, she notes that modern technologies allow business owners to search filings in the USPTO or comparable global organizations for brand names similar to their own.
“[These tools] will also scrape the Internet to look for infringements,” she notes, adding that many use machine learning to target counterfeit listings on big online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. Jessica adds that these monitoring services are often offered at various tiers—with basic packages providing simple domain monitoring functions and more premium options checking for IP registrations.
Invest in comprehensive digital security and transparency
Because brand abuse often leverages consumer confusion online, one of the best preventative measures your business can take is implementing large-scale digital security checks and measures. This might include buying similar domain names to prevent cybersquatting and using two-factor authentication on company email and social media accounts.
Regularly update customers on security practices to train them to recognize fraudulent impersonations and other illegal activities. For example, you may institute a policy that your brand will never affirmatively request sensitive information, such as birthdays and full credit card numbers, and publish it clearly on social media sites.
Brand protection FAQ
What is the meaning of brand protection?
Brand protection activities are strategies that monitor, identify, prevent, or respond to digital brand abuse. Brand abuse can take many forms like domain squatting, social-media impersonation attacks, and content piracy. Brand protection activities are a combination of preventative techniques and responsive strategies to combat brand abuse.
What is the best strategy for brand protection?
There are a number of brand protection strategies available to small business owners, the most important of which is unique branding that can be protected with a trademark. Doing this work upfront will ease the process of preventing and combating brand abuse down the line.
What are the risks of not having brand protection?
There are many risks of not having brand protection, including lost revenue and erosion of goodwill and trust with customers. Even if customers learn that your business is not responsible for brand abuse committed by a third party, they might be turned off by what they perceive as your lack of preparedness or commitment to protecting their information.
When do companies need brand protection?
Companies should be thinking about a brand protection strategy from the beginning of the entrepreneurial journey—that is, before danger strikes.
