How to Protect Your Brand
It takes a lot of time, effort, and money to build a company, but it’s not like once it’s up and running, you get to just sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labour.
No, instead, you need to work on protecting your brand, making sure that it’s not undermined by internal or external forces, which may be malevolent or simply an oversight.
This is something that you need to be proactive about; it’s much easier to focus on protecting your company, rather than waiting for something to happen before you take action.
So how should you go about this? We take a look at a few tried and tested recommendations below.
Legal Protection
Whatever you put out as a company might not automatically legally protected. You’ll likely know that you need to trademark your brand name and logo, but what about things like your web content and other materials?
In order to prevent someone else from stealing your work for their own use, you’ll want to register your website with DMCA — you’ll probably have heard of them, they’re the main players when it comes to copyright infringement takedowns.
Monitoring the Web
What if someone was out there, selling your products, and they were not authorized to do so?
There’s a reason why companies only work with certain businesses to sell their items; it’s because how they conduct themselves will have a knock-on effect to how people perceive the company that is manufacturing the products.
Now, it can be difficult to keep an eye on all platforms for signs that there’s someone selling your goods without your approval. Thankfully, there’s an easier way — you can use Track Street. It’ll help alert you to the presence of unauthorized sellers on Amazon and across the web.
A Guide for Employees
Your employees will have a huge impact on the overall success of your company, and also how your brand is perceived. As such, you’ll first want to ensure that you’re only hiring people who are in line with your overall company culture (your staff make the culture, as well as the other way round).
Second, you’ll want to look at creating a handbook for your workers to refer to. This will help to educate them about the right way to act, your expectations, and also how to interact with outsiders. Your branding can come undone if you have one employee on the team who doesn’t quite understand what you’ve created.
Look Overseas
As well as locally, you’ll also want to take a look overseas to check for any branding infringements. This can sometimes be difficult, but it’s worth pursuing — there could be an overseas company profiting from your hard work (and also undermining your reputation in that country, too).
Stay On Course
Finally, remember that you are your brand’s biggest strength and also the very person who can bring it down. Make sure that you’re staying true to the values you established when you founded the company, and you’ll avoid compromising your company’s ideals and mission statement.
Image Source: Pexels.com
How are you protecting your brand? Have you considered each of these aspects?
