How to Protect Your Brand Value 

We have established that a business’s brand is among its most valuable intangible assets. So after you’ve taken the steps addressed in previous modules and grown the value of your brand, you’ll need to know how to safeguard that brand value.

In this module, we’ll explore six strategies you should employ to protect your brand value.

 

6 strategies for protecting your brand value

1. MAKE SAFEGUARDING BRAND VALUE PART OF EVERY EMPLOYEE’S JOB

 It’s always important to keep in mind that there is no single individual or department in your company that has sole and total responsibility for protecting your brand—just as no such person or team exists to establish and grow your brand’s value in the first place. 

All of these priorities are the responsibility of everyone across your organization: every executive, investor, employee, consultant, intern, etc.

This means you need to build a company culture that encourages everyone to think of themselves as stewards of your company’s brand at all times.

Once again, let’s consider the Disney example. At its theme parks and other properties, all Disney employees—“Cast Members,” they’re called, whether they’re dancers in the parade or employees assigned to manage the line at a thrill ride—are trained to always behave with guests as though they are representatives of the Disney brand (because, of course, they are). 

A hostile or belligerent employee who is less than friendly to a child or family visiting a Disney theme park will almost certainly be fired on the spot. Disney knows how valuable it is to ensure that guests have only wonderful experiences during their stay at a Disney property.

Even the term Cast Member is an indicator of how seriously Disney takes this aspect of safeguarding its brand value. If you work in any capacity at a Disney hotel, theme park, or on a Disney Cruise, you are part of a cast of people who are there to create a magical vacation and entertainment experience for Disney’s guests. No role is exempted from this responsibility; everyone contributes to the guest’s experience, and to protecting the Disney brand.

 In your company, this means everyone—your customer service teams, your sales reps, your front-office staff, your marketing department, etc.—understands the importance of your brand value and takes seriously their role in protecting it.

Your tech support staff, for example, needs to know how important their role is to the overall public perception of your brand. In the era of social media, when a frustrated customer can tweet her anger at the snarky tech rep from your company—and that tweet can go viral—your brand’s value can be greatly affected (for good or bad) by anyone on your team.

 

2. SET UP AN AUTHORIZED DEALER PROGRAM

Often what harms a brand’s value has nothing to do with the product itself or anything the brand owner has done directly, but is instead the result of lousy experiences that customers have—and share publicly—when they purchase the company’s products through a bad retailer.

For a manufacturer or brand that sells through a resale channel, one of the greatest risks to that company’s brand value comes from a loss of control over which retailers are representing their products. Having inventory fall into the hands of a rogue reseller, a company that doesn’t have a relationship with the brand owner and therefore doesn’t care about honoring any of that brand owner’s policies, can create all sorts of problems—which customers, fairly or not, will attribute to the brand.

These risks have grown exponentially in recent years, as more retail operations are entirely online, and brands find it increasingly difficult to keep track of exactly what happens to their inventory at every step in the supply chain, from the factory to a retailer’s website.

Which is why it is so important that you find ways to limit which resellers are able to acquire your products in the first place. One effective way to do this is to establish an Authorized Dealer Program.

With this opt-in partner program, retailers interested in selling your products must apply to your network to become “authorized dealers.” You then draft agreements with your authorized distributors and wholesalers stating they are allowed to resell your products only to these authorized dealers. Typically these agreements include penalties for wholesale partners that sell to retailers not on this list, up to and including terminating those partners’ relationships with the manufacturer. 

An Authorized Dealer Program can act as a barrier that makes it more difficult for rogue sellers to get their hands on your inventory, violate your pricing policy and undermine your legitimate retail partners, and create lousy customer experiences that could ultimately hurt your brand value. 

Here are just a few ways an Authorized Dealer Program can help you protect your brand:

• It gives your wholesalers incentive to be careful about where they sell your products.
  Your wholesalers and distributors will know that if they sell to retailers or other wholesalers who aren’t on your authorized dealer lists, they could jeopardize their relationship with your company.

• It lets you work only with retailers you are comfortable will represent your brand well.
  With this program you can proactively build and control your retail sales channel—working only with businesses you are comfortable representing your brand—as opposed to allowing that channel just to form naturally as your wholesale partners sell to any retailers who submit bulk orders for your products.This won’t stop every instance of inventory “leaking” to rogue sellers, but it will help you significantly limit such problems.

• It lets you more easily trace the source of a rogue retailer.
  With an Authorized Dealer Program in place, if you do find an unauthorized seller advertising your products on a marketplace like Amazon, you will have a much easier time tracing that retailer back to its wholesale source.

Many Authorized Dealer Programs require distributors and wholesalers to track all sales to retailers and submit those reports to the manufacturer (or at least to have them handy if the manufacturer asks for them). With this information, you should be able to use either the name of the retailer or (if the seller is operating under a different name to hide) the specific product ID to figure out which wholesaler sold to this rogue seller.

 

3. USE AUTHORIZED DEALER BADGING TO HELP YOUR LEGITIMATE RETAILERS ESTABLISH CUSTOMER TRUST 

According to research, 79% of online shoppers expect to see a seal or badge on a site’s home page proving that they are trustworthy. Research has also found that adding these trust badges or icons at the point of sale can increase conversions by 20% or more.

If you develop an Authorized Dealer Program, one critical component of the packet you give your newly minted resellers when they make it through your vetting process is some sort of trust icon that they can display with all of their sales and promotions advertising your products.

This simple authorized dealer badging tool benefits everyone involved. For your retailer, being able to post a little “Authorized Dealer Verified” badge on their eCommerce site alongside your product helps them boost their own credibility with their customers.

For the shopper, this trust icon—if you make it a clickable link that opens a new window verifying your company has endorsed this retailer’s ability to sell your products—gives them the comfort of knowing they’re dealing with an authentic product from a legitimate seller.

And finally, this trust icon helps both protect your brand’s value in the sense that it will help your customers learn to distinguish your true retail partners—which are an important of your brand experience—from unauthorized retailers that they should stay away from.

 

4. MONITOR ALL PUBLIC ONLINE MENTIONS OF YOUR COMPANY, SUCH AS CUSTOMER REVIEWS AND RATINGS, AND BE READY TO RESPOND.

According to a study cited in Entrepreneur, 78% of US shoppers read product reviews or check out a product’s star ratings before they buy. So positive customer feedback online can clearly help with sales directly. But negative reviews can do more harm than just turn away an online shopper at the point of sale.

Because your brand value represents the sum total of all experiences the public has with your brand, bad reviews of your company’s products on eCommerce sites or marketplaces like Amazon can harm the public’s perception of your brand. In other words, they can erode your brand value over time. 

To protect your brand from this type of erosion, one key step will be to implement a systematic review tracking process, one that allows your company to monitor the entire Internet, 24/7, for all public references to your products. You also need to develop a process for responding to negative reviews— publicly and promptly.

We will discuss this process in more detail in later modules in this course, but here is a quick overview of the steps your review tracking strategy should include:

• Monitor the Internet at all times and always be ready to respond right away to a public complaint or negative review.
• Verify any poor review of low star rating is from a verified customer. (It could be from a competitor or someone just out to hurt your brand.)
• If you believe a negative review is fraudulent, flag it and report it to the eCommerce site or marketplace for investigation.
• Reply publicly to the bad review, and make your response personal and directed at the specific complaints or issues raised by the reviewer.
• Address the customer’s actual issue, or do your best to make things right.
• Ask for an adjustment to the negative review. (If you’ve made a good-faith effort and gone out of your way for a customer, they will often edit their original review.)

 

5. DRAFT AND PUBLISH AN EFFECTIVE RESELLER PRICING POLICY

When you consider how much your resale partners can affect your brand value (for better or worse), you can see why it’s so important that you establish a clear set of policies regarding how you want those resellers to represent your brand to their customers.

Which means you’re going to need a written, well publicized reseller pricing policy.

Because each business is different, you’ll have to determine for yourself which type of reseller policy makes strategic sense for your company. Generally speaking, though, you will probably want to draft one of the more common types of policies: a Unilateral Pricing Policy (UPP), also called simply a Unilateral Policy (UP), or a Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policy.

We will discuss the details of these policies in greater detail later in this course, but the basic difference between these two is that a MAP policy generally covers only a reseller’s advertised pricing (leaving the reseller to actually sell the brand’s products for whatever price it chooses), while a UP sets limits on both a retailer’s advertised prices and the prices it may actually sell the products.

Bottom line: If you sell your products through retail partners, those partners are taking your brand in their metaphorical hands with every sales page, ad and customer communication about your products. And because their mistakes or bad behavior—including advertising your products for less than you’re comfortable with—can undermine your brand’s value, you need to establish a clear set of guidelines upfront and demand every reseller follow them. Drafting and publishing a reseller pricing policy can translate directly to protecting your brand value.

 

6. MONITOR AND ENFORCE YOUR PRICING POLICY 24/7/365 

When you have a reseller policy in place, and you’ve communicated that policy to every one of your authorized resellers, your work isn’t done—it’s just started.

Now it’s be time to monitor the Internet to make sure your authorized resellers are adhering to your policy’s guidelines. You’ll also need to be looking for unauthorized retailers who are getting their hands on your products without your permission, underselling your legitimate retail partners, and possibly creating lousy buying experiences for customers that are leading to bad reviews and damage to your brand.

As with monitoring the Internet at all times for customer reviews and other public feedback about your brand, you almost certainly won’t be cost-effectively able to police your entire resale network at all hours of every day. 

Which means you’ll want to set up automated brand protection and reseller policy enforcement.

The right automated brand protection system will scour the entire Internet at all times, find any violations of your policies, alert you and your team in whatever way you prefer, and take whatever additional action you choose. 

But whichever solution you opt for, keep in mind that this step is not optional. As we hope we’re making clear throughout this online course, you can’t protect or build your brand’s value unless everyone on your team—and this includes the retail partners who bring your brand to their customers—is working to preserve that brand value.