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Without doubt the most important feature of any business is its brand. Developing a brand involves spending considerable
resources in terms of money, manpower and intellectual effort. A company's brand is the principle generator of its revenue. Such is the value of
the brand that it is not at all surprising that there are many crooks around who devote their time and effort to stealing the brands of other
businesses.
Online marketing is a way in which companies can establish their individual brands with relative ease. It is far less costly
than the expensive TV and radio advertising campaigns that used to be so necessary in order to make that brand visible to the general public.
Not only is it much less costly, it is also much more flexible. With online marketing, if a particular campaign is not working, then it is
very simple to modify it or abandon it completely in favour of an alternative Plan B. This is certainly not the case for TV advertising which
involves the huge up-front costs of developing the campaign and producing the advertisements.
The downside to brand establishment by online marketing is the vulnerability of the brand. Using no more than a few clicks of a
mouse it is not at all difficult to steal all that hard work that went into developing a brand along with much of the income that the brand
delivers. There is a multitude of ways in which counterfeiters and hackers can make illegitimate use of brands belonging to other companies in
ways that will benefit themselves financially and which have the potentially to do tremendous damage to the legitimate owner.
The web is such a huge place that tracking down this brand misuse by the application of human endeavour is just about impossible. Luckily, over
recent times, there have been considerable developments in the field of online brand protection software. This can be used to track numerous activities, both legitimate and illegitimate, that can impact on a company's brand. Illegitimate
activities such as brand cloning, brand theft and other counterfeiting activities can be searched for automatically and continually.
Of course detection is just part of the story, and the next steps that must be taken are not necessarily straightforward, but nothing can be done
without first detecting these activities.
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