Brand protection software guards against risks like product listings, websites, and social media that infringe on your intellectual property, sell counterfeit products and commit other online scams.
Marketplace brand protection challenges
Counterfeit Sales
Counterfeit products deceive the consumer by copying the brand’s logo and design, and they are often of inferior quality.
Grey market Sales
Genuine products being sold by sellers without the brand owner’s permission.
Trademark Infringement
Websites and social media pages can infringe on your trademark by posing as your company with its logo and a similar domain name.
Brand Abuse
Third-parties take advantage of your brand and IP to make a profit or damage your reputation.
Damages
Revenue loss
Reputation loss
Legal liability
Eroded pricing power
Decreased market share
Damage to distributor relations
If you want to read more, click here for a full Online Brand Protection Glossary.
Major Brand Protection Damages
Revenue Loss
Counterfeits, infringements, and brand abusers all steal revenue from your company. Shutting down rogue listings from counterfeits and grey-market sellers increases the visibility of your legitimate products, which can increase your ROI.
Reputation Loss
Lower prices from counterfeits and grey market products cause customers to question why your own prices are high in comparison. Customers of fake goods often blame the genuine brand for not protecting them against online scams.
Legal Liability
In many cases, a brand can be found liable if it did not carry out due diligence to protect consumers or educate them on counterfeits. Judgements can result in heavy penalties against manufacturers if counterfeit products cause injury or suffering.
BrandShield uses AI and machine
learning to detect and take down
infringements like counterfeits,
grey market dealers, and brand
impersonation with a success rate
of over 98%.
Save time with BrandShield’s
takedown capabilities to remove
volumes quickly and efficiently.
How Levi’s Triumphed The COVID-19 Pandemic
Global jeanswear brand Levi Strauss & Co. experienced a 100% increase in counterfeit and grey market sales and grey market sales during the COVID-19 pandemic. With more people shopping online, counterfeiters had a greater incentive to create and sell fake products.
In 2020, BrandShield detected 429 new infringing domain names that included “Levis” in the URL, which was an increase of 40% from the year prior. BrandShield’s enforcement experts also found that many of these sites were connected by malicious networks. In the end,
BrandShield’s enforcement experts were able to remove over 98% of the infringing websites.
Common mistakes in online brand protection
Brands may find that they aren’t doing enough to protect their intellectual property rights, or that brand protection feels like a game of whack-a-mole.
Brand protection common flaws:
Coverage
Does the program scan just websites and ecommerce sites? Can it protect your brand on mobile apps and social media as well? Can it cover a wide range of keywords and images across geographic regions and languages?
Technology
Basic keyword monitoring is simple, but can the program monitor images for trademarks as well? Can it use clustering technology to uncover links between rogue sites and product pages?
Takedown capabilities
What good is a brand protection solution that simply directs you to submit your own manual takedowns on various platforms? Find a solution that can automate takedowns based on rules and organize threats by priority.
Holistic workflows
When measuring effectiveness of a brand protection program, it’s important for different teams to work together fluidly, like legal and cybersecurity teams. Is it easy to navigate the brand protection software to log activity and collaborate with different stakeholders? Data from a brand protection program is also useful to other departments like marketing and sales.
The Role of Legal and Cybersecurity Teams in Brand Protection
Legal and cybersecurity teams both want to accomplish the same goal: protect the brand and minimize costs associated with external threats. For online brand protection software to be effective, the Chief Legal Officer (CLO) and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) need to be on the same page.
At times, this can be tricky, since one side can tend to communicate through industry-specific language that the other might not understand. Reducing counterfeiting and brand abuse requires a shared understanding of knowledge and goals between the departments.
Both teams have active roles in brand protection. For example, the legal team makes sure all IP, designs, and new product developments are trademarked and patented as early as possible according to trademark law. Legal teams also pursue actions against cybercriminals in court. The cybersecurity team maintains the company’s domain portfolio to protect against evolving cyber threats like typo squatting and domain squatting. It also safeguards key brand assets and intellectual property.
Successful brand protection requires both departments to communicate and work together to prevent brand infringement and eliminate threats.
About BrandShield Brand Protection Services
When it comes to choosing online brand protection software, go with the experts. BrandShield has years of experience taking down infringements and protecting intellectual property in many industries.
BrandShield detects and hunts online trademark infringement, counterfeit sales, and brand abuse across multiple internet platforms: websites, social media, marketplaces, PPC ads, and mobile apps. BrandShield’s technology prioritizes the detected threats, enabling you to focus on the most damaging violations and the biggest abuse networks.
Our enforcement experts remove those threats according to best practices developed by BrandShield after years of success with numerous third parties like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
What’s Different About Our Brand Protection Solution
BrandShield’s online brand protection solution combines the power of AI and machine learning with experienced threat hunters in an easy-to-use SaaS package.
Full and proactive coverage
Coverage including websites, domain names, marketplaces and social media.
AI powered detection technology
System detects networks of counterfeits or brand abuse through logo and product recognition, optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP), domain monitoring, and more.
Threat hunters
Certified lawyers with IP background and years of experience working with digital platforms.
Full case management
Manage takedowns, view historical data, and export reports from a simple interface.
Complete transparency
All data is fully accessible in the SaaS platform.
Ease of use
Setup requires no local installation and no extra integration beyond internet access.
BrandShield is a technology that helps change the balance in the fight against counterfeiters. The analytical capabilities of BrandShield allow our team to locate the most damaging online problems for New Balance at any given time. The interface is extremely intuitive yet has a magnitude of capabilities that help us perform and manage our enforcement activities with higher efficiency.”
Dan McKinnon
Intellectual Property & Brand Protection
Stop Infringements and Reclaim Revenue Today
Get in touch with a brand protection expert at BrandShield today to uncover the digital threats your brand is facing and reclaim lost revenue.