Who’s Responsible for Brand Protection?
With all of this talk about how important a brand is to a company’s bottom line, you might be wondering: Which person or department in a typical company is actually responsible for protecting the company’s brand?
It’s an intelligent and important question to ask. Are your sales and marketing departments responsible for brand protection? They’re the teams, after all, who are taking your brand out into the world. Maybe it’s your product management team who should own the brand protection role, or your legal department, or your executive staff, or your resale partners.
Few businesses ever stop to ask the question of who’s responsible for brand protection, and those that do often come to the wrong conclusion for a number of reasons. Let’s briefly examine a few of these common misconceptions. Then we’ll discuss the correct answer and explore what it means for your company.
Why brand owners often fail to assign the role of brand protection to the proper parties
1. THEY DEFINE “BRAND” FAR TOO NARROWLY
As we pointed out in Module 1 (What is a Brand?), many businesses view the concept of a brand far too narrowly.
Some businesses understand their brand simply as the company’s marketing campaigns or the unique look and feel of their products’ packaging. Such companies will often place marketing in charge of the “brand protection” role. (More established corporations with larger staffs might even have a “branding” team within its marketing department, and that team will own brand protection.)
Unfortunately, brand protection for these companies will amount only to issuing brand guidelines across the company and to partners and other third parties, insisting everyone abide by these guidelines—such as using the proper font for the company’s sales copy.
Other companies view their brand primarily as the portfolio of the organization’s trademarks, intellectual property, and other legal assets. For these businesses, the legal department or perhaps outside counsel will own the brand protection role.
Of course, as we’ve discussed in previous modules, your brand is a far broader component of your business than just your intellectual property or your website’s look and feel. Your brand represents the sum-total of your company’s reputation in the marketplace, and how the public feels about your business and your products.
2. THEY ASSUME THEIR EMPLOYEES WILL KNOW HOW TO PROTECT THEIR BRAND AGAINST ALL POTENTIAL THREATS
Another common mistake is for a business to assume its staff will somehow just know how to handle any of the potential challenges to its brand if and when they appear.
Because these companies clearly lack the knowledge and imagination to perceive all of the ongoing threats to their brand—particularly today, in the Internet and social media era—they don’t see the need to develop any official brand protection strategy.
As a result, such companies fail to train their staff on the importance of their brand and how to safeguard it, and they fail to assign any person or department within the company to implement and oversee a brand protection program.
3. THEY LEAVE BRAND PROTECTION TO THEIR RESALE PARTNERS
Some brand owners kick the responsibility for brand protection down the supply chain.
They might simply assume their wholesale and retail partners will act only in ways that reflect positively on the company’s brand. That means distributors and wholesalers will sell the company’s product only to highly reputable retailers or other wholesalers, companies they know and have vetted themselves. It also means retailers will advertise and sell the company’s products only in ways that create an outstanding customer experience and reflect well on the brand.
Or these brand owners might actually demand that their distribution and wholesale partners actively police the company’s brand for them as it travels through the retail market. Such brand owners might insist, for example, that a wholesale partner must enforce the company’s MAP policy or other reseller pricing policy for it.
In either of these cases, of course, the manufacturer or brand owner is shirking its own responsibility for protecting its brand. Wholesale and distribution partners certainly have role to play in safeguarding the brands of the products they sell. Retailers share in this responsibility as well.
But ultimately, the responsibility for protecting a company’s brand belongs to more than one person, department or entity.
Who should share responsibility for brand protection?
Bottom line: brand protection, the way we are defining it in this course—as taking steps to safeguard and grow a brand’s trust, goodwill, and public perception in the marketplace—is a shared responsibility. Each of the individuals and organizations listed below have a role to play:
- Every employee of the company
- Every consultant of the company
- All of the company’s partners and vendors
- All wholesalers, distributors, and retailers who ultimately bring the brand to market
5 steps every company should take to protect its brand
Okay, if every party in a brand’s orbit shares the responsibility for protecting it, the next logical question is: What should that look like? How should a company implement a brand protection program that properly involves all relevant parties?
Because brand protection requires such a broad set of responsibilities, there are obviously many ways a business can go about it. And of course the right set of steps for any specific brand owner will depend on that brand’s size, industry, priorities, and a number of other factors.
But here are a few steps that should be included in any brand protection strategy.
1. TRAIN THE COMPANY’S ENTIRE STAFF ON THEIR SPECIFIC ROLES
Imagine a customer tweets something negative, even hostile, about your company or your products. Could the way your employees respond publicly to that tweet—particularly if they respond in anger—hurt your brand? Of course it could.
If a gray-market seller starts advertising your products online at steep discounts, and your staff fails to spot the problem, could that over time hurt your brand? Of course it could.
Threats to your brand can come from many sources, both internally at your company and externally—from incompetent partners, shady retailers, angry customers, and even counterfeiters or intellectual property thieves. Every person within your organization could potentially face a situation that will affect your brand for better or worse.
So you must develop a system for training every employee (and consultant) across your organization on the importance of your brand to your company’s bottom line, and how they can help protect it in their role at the company.
2. INSTILL BRAND PROTECTION RIGHT INTO YOUR COMPANY’S CULTURE
Think about how central brand is to the world’s most successful companies. We all know that Coca Cola’s brand—the trust and goodwill it has built with consumers—is worth tens of billions of dollars and is largely considered the company’s most valuable intangible asset.
If we in the public know that about Coca Cola, you can be sure that all of its employees are repeatedly trained on the importance of brand to the company’s position in the market. Every Coca Cola employee knows that every action they take as a representative of the company could affect the Coke brand for better or worse.
You should communicate this regularly across your company as well. Your executives should be talking up the value of your brand—and the need to protect it—every chance they get. You should assess the actual value of your brand, in real terms (we’ll discuss how in a future module), and communicate that to your staff often.
Only when they truly understand how much your brand contributes to the overall health of your company will your staff know how important it is to safeguard it at all times.
3. ASSERT MORE CONTROL OVER YOUR RESALE CHANNEL—AND DEMAND THE BEST FROM THEM
If you sell through a resale channel—distributors, wholesalers, retailers—those partners will have plenty of opportunities to undermine your brand, whether they mean to or not.
So another key step for brand protection will be to take a more active role in what happens to your inventory after it leaves your factories, all the way up to when your retail partners publish sales pages online advertising your products.
This means drafting and enforcing a MAP policy or other type of reseller pricing policy.
It means developing an Authorized Dealer Program to help you restrict which retailers your wholesale partners may sell to.
It might also mean helping your authorized resellers establish trust with their customers when selling your products, such as giving them a trust icon or trust badge that they can place on their sites to prove to shoppers that they are legitimate sellers of your products.
4. DEPLOY AN AUTOMATED SYSTEM FOR ONLINE BRAND PROTECTION
This means finding a software application to monitor the entire Internet at all times for all references to your company and your products.
Such a solution will need to be continuously on the lookout for violations of your pricing policy or your intellectual property.
It should also monitor the web for customers reviews and ratings for all of your products, and ideally it should aggregate all of this data into reports that can help you identify specific issues, either with your products or with certain resellers who are creating problems for your brand.
Additionally, this online brand protection system should help automated your responses to violators, allowing you to react more quickly.
5. AGGRESSIVELY PURSUE COMPANIES THAT VIOLATE YOUR BRAND’S POLICIES
Finally, any smart brand protection strategy should be built on the understanding that it is simply impossible to prevent or thwart all threats to your company’s brand at all times.
A clever gray-market seller is going to a find way to sell your products in violation of some aspect of your reseller guidelines. A retail partner you’ve worked with for years is going to drop their advertised prices online below your MAP-approved levels—maybe only for a brief period of time, hoping you won’t notice.
You and your team need to be ready for situations like these, and prepared to act promptly and aggressively. That means knowing in advance how you will handle any such violation—based on the reseller policy you’ve drafted and published, and based on your understanding of where the antitrust legal lines are in these situations.
And this brings us back to all of the other steps we’ve suggested to this point.
You’ll need to make sure your team is trained, so they know how to handle these situations properly.
You’ll need to make sure brand protection is part of your corporate culture, so everyone knows how dangerous violations like these could be to your brand.
You’ll need to put systems in place—like an Authorized Dealer Program—to limit the chances of your products ever winding up in the hands of a crooked reseller who might harm your brand.
And you’ll need an automated online brand protection system scanning the web at all times for mentions of your brand.