Here’s a sad-but-true thought: while it may take years of toil to establish your brand, it doesn’t take much to ruin it.
Whether you’re a pioneer or a colonizer as a brand owner, you’re aware that the underlying value of your service or product rests in the quality of what your target market is consuming.Grey-market items (sometimes called the parallel market) often land devastating blows on a product and can even lower the reputation of an entire industry.
Building Your Brand Protection Program
Naturally, you don’t want your brand to suffer a death by 1,000 cuts, so what can you do? Here are five resources you should have in a brand protection program.
- A detailed case list. What details are of the greatest concern for you? Where are your case leads generating from? When are things happening during an investigation? Clearly, these are details that can prove pivotal in your understanding of how your brand is being compromised. Of course, simply keeping all of your cases in order frees up much of your bandwidth, too!
- Lists of who’s doing what on specific assignments. Being a manager of multiple investigations can be confusing. I could be easy to confuse different leads from different sources. If you’re on the market for an investigative brand protection program, automated details including who’s doing what with time, date and user stamps offers a clearer picture.
- A reliable report builder: compliant-ready for the regulation-heavy. Again, if you’re managing multiple investigations, you want to know the overall status of things. And, if you’re working within a heavily regulated industry, compliance troubleshooting is something you’ll want with an automated report generator. Reports also enable you to think independently concerning general trends.
- An orchestration helper. Subject matter experts, vendors, employees, clients and more -- a brand protection program that delineates all this clearly can save you plenty of headaches. Also, a calendar of actions allows relevant team members to know the right people for the right job at different times.
- A digital secretary. Such a large part of being a knowledge worker often boils down to clarity of note-taking, and where to put those notes. A digital secretary enables you to do things your own way: to style and generally tailor your notes toward the most relevant data. And, being able to store these notes along with all the relevant metadata -- information about other data such as pictures and more -- yields tremendous insight.
The more you work with the above five resources within a brand protection program, the easier and faster you’ll be able to forecast potential brand risks in the future. After all, a little bit of prevention can go much further than a lot of cure.
To learn more about having the right resources in place to protect your brand, seriously consider investing in software that meets all of your research and case-making needs. Learn more about how software can save your reputation.