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White Paper How Marketers Can Recoup Millions: 10 Best July 2009 Practices for Preventing Online Brand Scams
Executive Summary
There's no question that the Internet is an ideal venue for marketing. But along with the advantages come risks, due in part to the core qualities of the medium: openness, anonymity, and instant global reach.
Because the online world has seen so little formal policing, it's ideal for the "hijacking" of brands online. Scammers have realized that the value and power of your brand is very good for business-their business-and their gains come at the expense of marketers.
The number of venues available for taking unfair advantage of legitimate brands keeps growing: search engines, social networking, eCommerce, auction and tradeboard sites, email, blogs and microblogs. Whether the illicit activities are aimed at diverting traffic to competing businesses, exploiting your brand to generate advertising revenues, or stealing directly from your bottom line with potentially counterfeit and grey market sales, they all have the effect of eroding brand value and devaluing your marketing investments and revenue.
Unlike offline media, marketers have little to no control over brand-related content online. As a result, the online world requires closer monitoring. And because online brand abuse causes substantial brand erosion-lost revenue, diminished customer trust, and tarnished reputation-marketers may have the greatest stake of anyone when it comes to protecting brands online. As the de facto guardians of the brand, marketers can and should take the lead in protecting what they themselves have built-rather than relying solely on other areas of the organization. Best practices, targeted technologies and collaboration with other functional units can facilitate a holistic strategy for protecting hard-earned brand equity and revenues. White Paper: Preventing Online Brand Scams
Contents
The Brand Builder's World, Then and Now ............................... 3Online Brand Abuse: Should Marketers Worry? ...................... 4 Like it or not, marketers have the most to lose from online brand abuse.............................................................................................. 4
Prevalent Abuses: A Dismayingly Long List ............................... 5Marketers: Their Own Best Hope ................................................ 9What NOT To Do ........................................................................... 9Best Practices in Online Brand Protection ................................. 10When to Get Involved? NOW ....................................................... 11
2White Paper: Preventing Online Brand Scams
The Brand Builder's World, Then and Now
Not so long ago, brand-building was easier to manage than in today's wide-open environment. Go back three, even just two decades and count the communications vehicles: marketers could choose from newspapers, magazines, According to DIRECT television and radio, enjoying substantial control over all of them. With a media magazine, one in seven plan in place, and absent any massive public relations disasters, marketers searches on branded virtually dictated what would be seen, heard and read about their brands. items lead users Things were similarly simplified at the retail level, where prospect and customer somewhere other than the interactions were limited to brick and mortar stores, catalogs, and toll-free telephone lines. Signage, scripts, point-of-sale promotions and training kept the brand's website. Are YOU brand message on target. losing out on this much traffic-or more?Things have changed-thanks to the Internet. In what has proven to be a marketer's dream, communication and distribution channels have grown (and continue to expand) exponentially: from search engines to eCommerce, auction sites and trade boards, from blogs to social networking sites and-yes, even microblogs.
The marketers of 1980 would have jumped at the opportunity to leverage such flexible, cost-effective, and easily segmented media platforms and distribution channels. But they may also have landed in many of the same pitfalls we face today-the Internet's openness, anonymity, global reach and distinct lack of formal policing have paved the way for brand abuse, traffic diversion, online fraud and unauthorized distribution channels.
Joining the attack is a gro... [download for more]
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