What Is Brand Protection? (and How to Go Beyond It)

Additional Resources

More online brand protection methods

It’s obvious that today’s brands need traditional ‘brand protection’ strategies. But what about broader brand management and protection of preferred brand narrative and online reputation? Thankfully, brands can leverage their collection of owned assets to achieve success across all aspects of digital marketing. 

Brands that are serious about intellectual property protection must implement a holistic, company-wide reputation defense as well. 

Unforeseen events that harm or destroy a brand’s credibility or narrative in any industry can result in billions of dollars in lost value, sometimes eclipsing that of brand abuse.

Beyond brand protection

Creating a network of optimized and controlled online properties is the most powerful way for brands to achieve an authoritative position within an industry. Collectively, the properties can be leveraged to spread value throughout the brand’s digital footprint.

From corporate site to allies, blog posts, and more, the network of highly aligned online properties achieves the following:

• Dominates the search engine results for the brand’s name
• Allows a brand to reach its audience at all funnel stages
• Tells the authentic brand story in a consistent, authoritative way
• Asserts control over brand narrative and reputation
• Takes back the power from digital publishers, review sites, and affiliates
• Maximizes the value and purpose of each online asset

How it works

Typically, and at a very high level, the ongoing process includes the following steps:

1. Collect and categorize all existing owned assets. This includes every single page a brand controls, plus its allies.
2. Analyze all this existing online real estate for performance and prioritize optimizing each as needed.
3. Search for gaps or opportunities to create new, high-value owned assets. 
4. Optimize all existing online real estate from multiple discipline perspectives.
5. Create all the new assets your gap analysis suggested.
6. Use linking to tie the entire network together.
7. Assess performance over time, creating ongoing reports with numerous KPIs.
8. Continue to refine each asset based on its performance across the KPIs.
9. Rinse and repeat.

Over time this optimization strategy will result in increased online visibility, full-funnel customer engagement, control over the brand narrative, protection from potential brand harm during bad news cycles, and increased market share and spike in brand value.

Final Thoughts

Brand protection and its highly specific management of intellectual property is among the most important foundations of any valuable company. The benefits go without saying and it applies to all industries.

But is brand protection enough? The answer is almost certainly not. 

Savvy brands embrace an owned asset-forward philosophy to take back ownership of their stories and dominate the market and aggressively defend their intellectual property rights.

Brand Protection FAQs