Gone are the days when a single department in an organization shouldered the responsibility for a company’s brand protection strategy. A research paper that discussed the future of online brand protection shows that inter-department involvement, starting with the board’s approval and support, down to the implementation of the strategy by different departments, is required.

Another shift is that a brand protection strategy should be more than just registering a trademark. It should also ensure that only authorized retailers and dealers sell one’s products and that customers are satisfied so they would leave positive feedback. More than 80% of companies also plan to change their brand protection strategies in light of the proliferation of cyber threats. In particular, a majority of them are focusing more on their domain protection as websites have been a top target for infringement.

What direction should a company take concerning its brand protection strategy? We explored some of the essential brand protection services that can strengthen an organization’s strategy.

Brand Monitoring

One of the first things that companies should prioritize is monitoring their brand. How do people perceive their brand name? Is it associated with something that could be detrimental to its reputation and image? Equally important is the question, “Are competitors or other third parties using variations of their brand name?”

Since a domain carries an organization’s brand, it only makes sense to monitor it using tools such as Brand Monitor or Brand Alert API, which tracks all domains, including newly registered and recently expired ones, that are related to a brand. When we ran Mastercard on the tool, for instance, it returned more than 100 domains that can make use of the brand name, including apparently misspelled variants registered recently.

By monitoring domains that use a brand in one way or another, its owner can stay on the lookout for cybersquatters.

Competitor Monitoring

Competitor monitoring has always been a critical business process, as it helps shape a company’s pricing strategies and product development, among many others. With the fierce competition present in almost every industry, some competitors could be trying to damage your brand by infringing your domain.

As such, monitoring domains that competitors own should be a part of your brand protection strategy. Tools such as Registrant Monitor or Registrant Alert API allow you to input a domain owner’s name, assuming that it has been used during the domain registration process, to return all of the domains bought by that individual or organization and be alerted of his/its domain-related moves in the future.

Domain Reputation Checking

There may be configuration issues in your domain infrastructure that can affect your reputation. Serious problems can even result in blacklisting, which is detrimental to your brand. For one, being blacklisted could result in low search engine optimization (SEO) ranking despite all your efforts to publish high-quality content with the right keywords.

Another thing that a lousy domain reputation can result in is email undeliverability. Part of some organizations’ cybersecurity protocol is to block emails coming from domains with low reputation scores. That said, you may not be able to reach your intended recipients via email if your domain has a low reputation score. So, aside from your search engine ranking, your email marketing efforts would suffer as well.

Therefore, It’s important to check your domain reputation regularly with the help of Domain Reputation API. The tool can detect several factors that may negatively affect your score, such as:

• The presence of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) vulnerabilities
• Host misconfigurations
• Listing on any malware data feed
• Name server misconfigurations
• IP address infrastructure issues

* * *

In a world where people do business based on trust, domain brand protection is a crucial business process. As in the case of several areas in life and business, prevention is better than cure. An organization may find it difficult to recover from a tarnished brand image, so it’s better to protect your brand using brand protection services.