Brand Protection Tips: How to Protect Your Brand on Amazon

Brand protection, as its name implies, is a business term referring to the protection of one’s brand or intellectual property. There are a...

Brand protection, as its name implies, is a business term referring to the protection of one’s brand or intellectual property. There are a lot of entities that could take advantage of weak brand protection. Some of these offenders include counterfeiters that try to steal your brand and label their own fake items with it. This can be quite devastating for the brand to have counterfeits, especially if they severely lack in quality. Infringers of copyrights and pirates can also take a toll on your business if your product relies heavily on revenue from royalties.

Amazon is the biggest online retailer right now and quite a number of third party businesses have set up shop there. This makes brand protection a little bit more trickier than in a brick and mortar shop. Since your product is on display for the entire world to see through the internet, amazon brand protection will have to deal with possible points of attack from virtually everywhere.

The objective of amazon brand protection for your shop is not to simply protect the revenue. Albeit that might be the end goal, brand damage can do more than just destroy businesses. It can damage the personalities behind it as well. The reputation, a company’s image and the overall value of your product are fundamental in the business world. At its essence, we amazon brand protection is the prevention of brand abuse.

What is Brand Protection and Brand Abuse?

Brand abuse is a general term that could be any damaging act done upon a business’s brand. Anyone from outside of your business can take advantage of your brand through a lot of different ways. It would be prudent for businesses to remain vigilant should their brands be a target for brand abuse. What is probably the type brand abuse that is most prevalent, as well as difficult to stop, is counterfeiting.

How to Protect Brand from Counterfeiting on Amazon

A counterfeit is basically an imitation of a brand which is often done poorly in an effort to gain profit off of someone else’s idea or innovation. Although there are official and legal means to imitate the likeness of one’s products such as the case in paying for loyalties, these are not the kind of situations where one can consider brand abuse. Consumer deceit is what drives counterfeits. Either the consumer is completely unaware or fails to notice that the product is counterfeit or he himself wishes to appear to have bought the original product. Such is a common social maneuver that may take its toll on the actual brand.

Global counterfeiting continues to grow as years go by and it has significantly exploded after the rise in popularity of online markets. It is predicted that two years from now, the entirety of the counterfeiting industry will be worth as much as $4.2 trillion. This amount would be enough to power the largest countries in the world. If this proves anything, it is that there is money in counterfeiting and thus battling it would require perseverance as the practice has been greatly ingrained into modern business practices of some. The same amount of money that has gone into counterfeiting would have gone someplace else had it not exist. That place could be innovation to improve products of deserving businesses but instead these businesses could be facing closures.

Albeit only one form of brand abuse, counterfeiting has been proven to be the most devastating and prevalent. Authenticity of the brands becomes target and thus counterfeiting can damage the brand’s reputation. Online markets such as Amazon can be an easy target for counterfeiting as well as selling counterfeit goods. There are ways for you to identify sellers that are exploiting your brand so you can report it to Amazon. Remaining vigilant is key to ensure that your product brand will not be abused. A simple routine search can prove quite effective in beating counterfeiters to the punch.

How to Protect Brand from Rogue Websites on Amazon

The internet is essentially a free open space for everyone that is connected to it. In essence, this means that the internet is the virtualization of freedom and democracy that the modern age has embraced. This allowed the free flow of ideas that interconnected the minds and hearts of billions across the world. The sudden exponential advancement of society in the last couple of decades can be attributed to this channel of communication.

Each innovation carries with it boons as well as causes for concern. While the giants of the internet and the governments came together to curb illicit activities, there is no denying that this is a tough feat and will overwhelm even the most powerful entities. Such malicious content in the open web are the rogue websites whose intent is to simply infringe upon the rights of legitimate businesses. There are three kinds of rogue websites.

Cybersquatters are websites that take advantage of the names of brands and append it into their website names. Since website domain registries assert likeness on a per character basis, it is quite easy to make website domain names that undermine brands by simply adding new characters or other ways to represent the brand. Oftentimes, owners of these sites act as pirates by putting the name of the site on ransom to be sold to the brand owners being attacked. Efforts are made by search engines to minimize the traffic into websites considered to be a cybersquatter. Owners of businesses should be quick to discredit the site and report it to the authorities. And, as always, vigilance by simple routine engine searches can effectively prevent these cases.

Typosquatters are similar to cybersquatters in that they try to deceive users by diverting them into their sites. Instead of using the actual names of the brands however, typosquatters prey on misspellings of the actual sites. Once the user keys in the typo into the address bar and navigates to the site, they are often met with a site similar to the actual one.