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Brand Protection Services Guide

Maintain great relationships with your customers with brand protection services.

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Updated May 2, 2024

When managing a business, think of it as having a relationship with your customers. It’s important to build trust, show integrity, and be genuine. Brand protection takes care of the connection you’ve built with your customers. It’s essential to maintaining your hard-earned reputation and credibility with key stakeholders. 

Imagine spending years, resources, and manpower establishing your brand, positioning it as you dream of. Brand protection will be the cornerstone that will help preserve that reputation you’ve tirelessly invested in.

In an age where misinformation can spread like wildfire and bad news can trend overnight, good brand protection measures can hold the front lines and safeguard your brand. Threats like counterfeits and deception can easily break customer trust, so preserving your integrity in the marketplace is more important than ever. 

It doesn’t matter what industry your business is in or how big it is; brand protection is a great investment in the long run. This detailed hiring guide delves into the different brand protection services, key metrics to monitor, and other crucial information that can help you hire the right B2B provider for your brand.

What is Brand Protection?

Brand Protection: A type of branding and public relations management that focuses on preserving a company’s intellectual property (IP) and brand integrity.

Rather than shaping its reputation, this service is primarily concerned with protecting the company as the global market becomes increasingly more challenging and unpredictable because of the internet.

Internet culture has taken the world by storm, impacting different industries and aspects of business. Brand protection is a multifaceted solution that allows companies and organizations to combat alarming threats to their reputations. 

Brand protection ensures that the company’s trademarks, copyrights, and patents are protected from infringement or malicious piracy.

Essentially, brand protection involves strategic prevention measures, monitoring procedures, and implementation guidelines. It also requires training and educating company personnel to manage sensitive business information to ensure strict security.

In some cases, brand protection is combined with advantaged cybersecurity measures such as data protection to safeguard the brand from online social engineering attacks and data campaigns. 

In an era where consumers keep a close eye on the companies they support, brand protection is a solution that should be prioritized to take care of their most precious asset — their brand. 

5 Benefits of Brand Protection

Brand protection may seem like an unnecessary measure for some, but it offers invaluable benefits that can help position your business for long-term sustainable success. 

brand protection benefits

Here are the 5 main benefits you unlock with brand protection services:

  1. Reputation security: The biggest goal and benefit of brand protection is safeguarding your business from unauthorized use of your intellectual property that can cause reputation damage. Additionally, brand protection adds more value to your brand and contributes to its resilient position in your market or niche. 
  2. Mitigate financial loss: Counterfeiting and product piracy have become massive headaches to companies worldwide, especially in the retail, fashion, and luxury spaces. These abuse and illegal activities can cost brands millions in financial losses, hampering overall business growth. By investing early in effective brand protection services, businesses can quickly identify pirated products and address threats that could ultimately affect their profitability.
  3. Protecting customer trust: Among the major concerns for counterfeit products are their impact on customer health, security, and safety. These subpar products didn’t go through the company’s quality inspections and can come with potential defects that could harm customers. Proactively taking care of your brand helps maintain confidence and good faith between your business and your target consumers. 
  4. Providing regulatory and legal compliance: In some countries and industries, brand protection is a regulatory and legal requirement that could cost serious fines if businesses fail to comply. Brand protection services aren’t just for businesses; they also protect consumers and industries from unethical practices. 
  5. Delivering peace of mind: Peace of mind is invaluable to business owners and entrepreneurs. Outsourcing your brand protection needs ensures that you get access to dedicated professionals with extensive experience monitoring online marketplaces, pursuing threats, and strategically preventing intellectual property infringement. The peace of mind you get will give you more freedom to focus on core responsibilities and achieving business goals. 

What Services Do Brand Protection Companies Offer?

Brand protection plays a big role in the modern marketplace. If you plan to hire a proven brand protection company for your business, you can access services such as:

IP Protection

Intellectual property refers to intangible assets or artistic works such as symbols, designs, and logos used for commercial purposes. They are visual assets closely associated by customers to the brand or business. 

Intellectual property protection is a solution that focuses on safeguarding business IP to maintain their competitive edge in the marketplace and prevent illegal profiting from brand exploitation.

When you hire a brand protection team, they’ll handle everything from filing IP rights on authorized government or regulatory bodies to enforcing legal actions. 

Trademark Monitoring and Enforcement

As its name suggests, trademark monitoring and enforcement is a form of brand protection tactic that focuses on securing trademark infringements.

Trademarks are distinguishable assets that are registered to be used to represent a business, organization, or product. Filing for trademark protection is crucial to guarding your brand against counterfeiting and fraud. 

Brand protection companies help businesses not just own a trademark but register it to have legal rights against perpetrators. The team is responsible for identifying authorized pages that misuse a company's registered trademark. They flag them down and take appropriate actions to take down trademark misuse.

Counterfeit Detection

Counterfeit detection services aim to help businesses quickly identify counterfeit products and prevent frauds from profiting from imitations. It’s essential to maintaining the brand’s integrity and avoiding reputation damage due to inferior imitations.

The counterfeiting market has seen significant growth in recent years, becoming one of the most lucrative businesses that cost countless brands millions of dollars annually. 

Brand protection companies implement different strategies to track, recognize, and prevent counterfeiting. They also help the company arrange documents for legislative hearings and criminal persecution related to counterfeiting.

Legal and Regulatory Consultation

Every industry and country has laws and regulations on trademarks, patents, and copyrights. It can confuse businesses, especially those based in one location but expanding to different countries or regions.

Legal and regulatory consultation is one of the main services brand protection companies offer. They provide legal counsel on how to protect and follow IP and consumer protection laws. 

They have legal experts who assist their clients in registration processes, drafting legal agreements, and creating compliance policies for their companies. Their expertise is crucial in navigating the complex brand and consumer protection legal landscapes. 

Brand Protection Training and Awareness

Educating key stakeholders, such as employees, is as important as implementing preventive and protection measures. Brand protection teams offer comprehensive education and training services to help employees understand the importance of brand protection, counterfeiting, and fair use of intellectual property.

They have dedicated courses, training materials, and workshop programs to help staff easily understand the topics. They teach courses on spotting counterfeits, trademark infringement, and other brand misuse.

Brand Reputation Management

Brand reputation is the strategic process of consistently monitoring and improving people’s perception of a brand. Nowadays it is more focused on garnering good testimonials and protecting your brand's online reputation on review platforms such as Clutch and Google. 

Just like with all the other services offered by brand protection companies, brand reputation management is a continuous process that is crucial to establishing a strong market presence. 

How to Assess Brand Protection Services

While the brand protection team monitors the market for your business, it’s up to you to monitor their performance to assess whether their efforts are up to par with your needs. Knowing the key performance indicators (KPIs) is important to evaluate their effectiveness and impact on preserving your brand’s reputation. 

Listed below are important KPIs for brand protection:

  1. Trademark infringement cases addressed: This metric tracks the number of trademark infringement cases the team successfully resolved through enforcement measures such as cease-and-desist letters and legal warnings.  
  2. Counterfeit listing removed: This refers to the number of counterfeit products or listings the team swiftly flagged and blocked online on various marketplaces, websites, and social media channels. 
  3. Domain name infringement flagged: The number of domain names the team blocked that contain the company’s brand or trademark identifiers. The website should be taken down to prevent damaging phishing schemes and cybersquatting. 
  4. Average response time: This metric records how fast the average time the team spent responding and resolving different incidents. It reflects the team's flexibility, efficiency, and overall effectiveness in taking appropriate actions against threats. 
  5. Response effectiveness: This metric evaluates how the team took action against the incidents they’ve identified. It looks into what type of measure they implemented — whether through takedown requests or legal proceedings — and how impactful it was. 
  6. Brand reputation KPIs: When assessing this, evaluate different brand reputation metrics such as Share of Voice (SOV), sentiment analysis, and Net Promoter Score (NPS). The results will help you gauge whether the team is doing a good job protecting your brand’s reputation and relationships with key stakeholders.
  7. Monitoring accuracy: This benchmark measures how accurately the team detects intellectual property infringement and cases of brand misuse. For this, track how fast they flag the incident and scrutinize other forward-looking measures they have in place. 
  8. Scope of services: Evaluate the overall coverage of their monitoring measures and geographic capacity, including the languages, channels, and markets. If your business has a vast reach, the team must cover the same or even a wider range. 

What is a Brand Protection Company?

Brand protection service providers are specialized public relations firms that offer expert brand protection solutions to help businesses guard their intellectual property and brand identity. They are responsible for the strategy, legal action, close monitoring, and execution of prevention measures to combat brand abuse.

brand protection team

Hiring a brand protection company gives you access to diverse skills and expertise to successfully navigate the complex challenges brought by the era of counterfeits and brand infringement. Here are the main team members that make up a well-oiled brand protection team:

Who Makes Up a Brand Protection Team?

  • Brand Protection Director. Also referred to as managers, they are considered the head responsible for overseeing the entire brand protection efforts. They are in charge of monitoring the team and tracking progress and objectives for the initiatives.
  • IP Attorney. The legal specialist provides guidance and legal support to intellectual property concerns such as trademarks, patents, and copyrights.  
  • Market Investigator or Monitor. This teammate is in charge of conducting investigations into identified brand misuse cases. They collect evidence, analyze data, and organize intelligence that can be used to combat perpetrators during legal proceedings. 
  • Digital Forensic Specialist. They worked closely with the Market Investigators to gather online forensic evidence such as digital footprints and suspicious IP addresses that can support the case. These professionals specialize in tracking down the source of brand abuse online. 
  • Brand Coordinator. They are primarily responsible for coordinating administrative tasks such as data entry, appointment setting, and documenting with other team members and relevant stakeholders. 
  • Complaints Specialist. This teammate is focused on handling complaints, addressing customer inquiries, and recording customer reports of brand misuse. They typically work closely with Customer Support Representatives to maintain good standing with customers. 

What to Look For When Hiring Brand Protection Companies

Searching for the ideal brand protection company requires a great understanding of your business first and foremost. Before you set out to hunt for prospective service providers, it’s crucial to have an outline of your project and a list of priorities you value in a team.

Being organized and knowing your project’s needs helps you focus on finding the right team that can fulfill your requirements. This maximizes the likelihood of success for your project and ensures optimal return on investment (ROI). Below is a list of common criteria set by companies looking for a trustworthy brand protection partner.

Criteria for Hiring a Brand Protection Team 

  • Industry expertise & experience
  • Good track record with previous clients
  • Range of services offered
  • Reach of monitoring services
  • Tools and technologies used
  • Compatibility with company culture & communication preferences
  • Pricing & value proposition
  • Geographic location

Having criteria that fit your needs ensures you connect with a dependable, secure, and effective brand protection company. Carefully scrutinizing their track record, including client reviews and portfolios, will help you understand if they can perform to your standards.

It is important only to shortlist the companies that meet your criteria so you don’t spend a lot of time interviewing different service providers. Once you’ve trimmed down your options to 2 to 4 companies, schedule interviews and consultations to discuss your project. 

When the interview begins, ask questions to help you gain deeper insights into their services. Here are a few questions you should consider asking when discussing with brand protection companies:

10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Brand Protection Services

  1. What specific brand protection strategies and tactics do you specialize in?
  2. What tools and software solutions do you use for your services?
  3. How do you tailor your solutions to your clients’ needs and businesses?
  4. How do you proactively monitor different digital channels for brand misuse?
  5. Can you walk us through your typical response procedure?
  6. How do you ensure we remain compliant with laws and regulatory requirements? 
  7. How do you ensure swift brand misuse detection and action?
  8. How often will the team report progress and cases?
  9. Can you tell us more about an interesting brand protection case you’ve successfully resolved?
  10. Do you have bespoke solutions to automate takedown and mitigation?

Take Control With The Right Brand Protection Team

In business, branding is everything. Consumers base their choices on brands they trust; brands that have built trust with their customers over time through authenticity, quality, and service. Amidst the rising number of imitation brands, intellectual property fraud, and piracy, brand protection is an essential investment that pays dividends. 

Avoid tarnishing your brand’s reputation by opportunists who will go the extra mile to profit from established products with a good brand protection team.

You can confidently search and hire the ideal brand protection team with the insights you’ve gained from this guide. Head over to Clutch’s rankings for the leading brand protection companies and use the filters we’ve prepared to match with the right partner. 

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