How the Brand Protection Solutions Secure your Brand's Reputation?

 

Brand protection refers to the act of securing your brand from threat actors. Threat actors infringe on your brand by using its Intellectual Property (IP). They violate your trademarks, copyrights and affiliate campaigns.

Never before brands have been under so much pressure to protect themselves. Consumers are adapting themselves to digitalization and purchasing most things online. Companies are launching various types of affiliate marketing campaigns to promote their goods and services.

The rise in the demand for e-commerce has given rise to cybercrimes. Malicious affiliates can tarnish the reputation of your brand in a negative manner. Over the past few years, affiliate marketing has become one of the mainstays of the e-commerce domain.

Businesses use affiliates to market their products and improve sales apart from brand promotion with the help of varied promotional channels. Affiliate marketing is a performance-based model that your marketing team leverages to promote products. And as there is a significant amount of funds involved, affiliate marketing is an easy target for threat actors.

Affiliate fraud refers to any unscrupulous activity to generate commissions from an affiliate marketing program. Companies must deploy the right type of brand protection solutions to minimize fraud and secure their brand’s reputation. 

Things to Know about Brand Infringement

In the digital world, brand infringement refers to the use of your company’s intellectual property to attract customers. Brand infringement is one of the most common strategies used by nefarious affiliates to steal your marketing budget.

The malicious affiliates use your brand’s trademarked property, like name, logo, and slogans, to grab the attention of your users. Threat actors can also hijack the buying journey of your customers. Infringement on your brand’s rights can dilute its strength.

Brand infringement can create headlines for all the wrong reasons. Brand protection isn’t that simple in a world flooded by threat actors. It is because there are so many ways that your brand can come under attack.

Brand infringement due to affiliate fraud can destroy your goodwill in the market. You can’t allow threat actors to go unchallenged. Nefarious affiliates can endanger your present brand equity and the reputation of the products.

The Repercussions of Infringing on your Brand’s IP Rights

The consequences of infringing on a brand’s IP right are alarming. You will lose your loyal customers when there is brand infringement due to affiliate fraud. The legitimate affiliates of your company will stop collaborating. In affiliate fraud, you tend to pay the nefarious affiliates instead of the legitimate affiliates. Here are the repercussions of brand infringement due to affiliate fraud.

Affects the Reputation of your Brand in the Target Market

It takes years for any company to build its brand’s value in specific target markets. The nefarious affiliates can use your brand’s trademarked properties at infamous places. And when your customers notice the presence of your brand’s logo in these places, they will stop buying from you.

You will notice a Lower Enrolment Rate among the Affiliates

During affiliate fraud, your marketing team misattributes the commissions to malicious affiliates. The legitimate affiliates of your company have put all the hard work to promote your brand in the target market. But the malicious affiliates tend to receive all the credit. The actual affiliates may feel demotivated and leave your affiliate campaign midway.

Loss of Marketing Budget

Using the logo and name of your brand on promotional campaigns makes it easier for the threat actors to attract users. Affiliate fraud like cookie stuffing and URL hijacking can be troublesome for your company. You may have to face chargebacks from credit card companies. These types of attacks can exploit your brand’s image and damage the trust of the customers.

The Types of Affiliate Fraud and their Repercussions

Here are some of the common types of affiliate fraud that can give rise to brand infringement.

Cookie Stuffing

Cookie stuffing is an illegitimate technique of developing a wrongful attribution. It involves stealing the credit of legitimate affiliates working with your company. The best way to counter this fraud is by implementing ad fraud detection solutions.

Typosquatting

Typosquatting is another major type of affiliate fraud. The threat actors purchase misspelled domains similar to your company’s URL. They guess the mistakes people will make while searching for your company’s products. In typosquatting, malicious affiliates diversify your website’s traffic.

Misleading Deals

It is a strategy of drawing the buyer’s attention by highlighting deals and coupons with your brand’s labeling. The unscrupulous affiliates use your brand’s logo and slogan and embed them into the coupons. The main objective of misleading deals is to redirect traffic to the advertiser’s website. By redirecting traffic, the threat actors earn commissions without putting in any real effort.

How do Virus Positive Technologies (VPT) Protect your Brand’s Reputation?

VPT can secure your brand’s IP rights from nefarious affiliates. The clickfraud protection platform of VPT ensures that you stay protected from the ill intentions of threat actors. VPT monitors your affiliate networks and raises alerts during violations.