Brand protection is the set of legal, technical, and operational measures a company uses to stop other people from trading on its name. In practice that means registering and enforcing trademarks, controlling the domain names that carry the brand, removing counterfeit products and copied content, and shutting down accounts and websites that impersonate the company or its people. The goal is simple to state and hard to execute: make sure that when a customer, partner, or employee encounters your brand online, it is actually you.
This explainer defines the scope of brand protection, distinguishes it from reputation management, explains who inside a company owns it and why it falls between departments, gives a realistic picture of what it costs, and describes the minimum program a small business should have. It is part of our online brand protection hub, which covers the full program in depth.
The scope of brand protection
Brand protection covers five kinds of asset, and a program that addresses only one leaves the others exposed.
Trademark protection is the legal core. A registered trademark gives the owner the right to stop others from using a confusingly similar mark on related goods and services, and it is the credential that nearly every enforcement mechanism requires. A company without a registered mark has very little to enforce. Our guide on trademarks and brand protection explains the mechanics.
Domain protection is the layer DNAccess considers the foundation of everything else. It covers the domains you own (securing them against theft and expiration), the domains you should own (your mark in the TLDs where you do business), and the domains no one should own (your mark and its variants everywhere else, which is what domain blocking services address). Cybersquatting, the bad-faith registration of a domain matching someone else’s trademark, is the most common domain-level abuse; our explainer on cybersquatting covers what it is and how it is remedied.
Content protection covers copyrighted material: product photography, marketing copy, software, video, and documentation that is copied and republished without permission. Product protection covers counterfeits, gray-market goods, and unauthorized resellers, usually on marketplaces. People impersonation covers fake executive profiles, cloned customer support accounts, and email that appears to come from your staff, a category that overlaps heavily with phishing and is addressed in our page on brand impersonation.
Brand protection versus reputation management
The two are often confused because both concern how the public perceives a company. The distinction is about who is speaking. Brand protection deals with unauthorized use of your identity by someone pretending to be you or to be affiliated with you. Reputation management deals with what other people say about you in their own voice: reviews, news coverage, social media commentary, search results that are accurate but unflattering. A counterfeit storefront using your logo is a brand protection problem; a one-star review from a genuine customer is a reputation management problem. The first is removed through trademark enforcement, the second addressed through response, content, and service improvement. Our guide to brand reputation management covers the second discipline, and the case for why brand protection is important explains how the two reinforce each other.
Who owns brand protection inside a company
Three departments each hold a piece of it, and that is the problem. Legal owns the trademark portfolio and handles cease-and-desist letters, UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) complaints, and litigation. Marketing owns the brand itself, notices when a competitor bids on the company name in paid search or when a fake account appears on social media, and usually controls the budget for monitoring tools. IT or security owns the registrar accounts, DNS, and email authentication, and is the first to see a lookalike domain sending phishing mail to employees.
Brand protection falls through the cracks because no one of these groups sees the whole picture. Legal does not know which domains the company owns or which registrar holds them. Marketing does not know that the domain the company’s website sits on has no registry lock. Security treats a lookalike domain as a phishing incident to be blocked at the mail gateway rather than as a trademark problem to be taken down at the registrar. The result, in our experience, is a company that has registered its trademark, bought a monitoring tool, and still has its main domain in a shared registrar account with a password that has not changed in years. A working program names one owner and gives that person visibility into all three functions.
What brand protection costs
Honest cost figures are scarce because most of the published numbers come from vendors or from small surveys, so the figures below should be read as indicative. The INTA New gTLD Cost Impact Survey, which gathered responses from 33 member companies in 2015 and 2016, reported average spending of $150,000 per year on defensive actions, with 97 percent of respondents having registered domains in the prior 24 months, an average of 352 domains and a median of 78, according to the INTA cost impact report, which itself flags high variability in the responses. The same survey put the median cost of a UDRP proceeding at $9,500 (from only nine respondents), the median cost of a cease-and-desist letter at $3,000, and the median cost of internet monitoring of trademarks at $13,300 per year.
The medians are more useful than the averages for a mid-sized company: a single enforcement action costs a few thousand dollars, monitoring costs in the low five figures, and the largest recurring line item is the defensive domain portfolio. That last item is where blocking changes the arithmetic, because a registry-level block covers hundreds of extensions for a flat fee instead of a per-domain renewal.
The direction of spending is upward. MarkMonitor’s 2018 survey of brand owners, a vendor survey that is useful for trend rather than current magnitude, found that 64 percent of respondents said infringement had increased in the prior year, 86 percent had experienced phishing attacks in the prior 12 months, and 55 percent were managing their domain name strategy more actively, according to the MarkMonitor Future of Online Brand Protection report. The phishing figure is the one to notice: it means the typical brand owner is already paying for brand protection in incident response, whether or not it has a program.
A minimum viable program for a small business
A small business does not need an enterprise platform, but it does need four things, and it needs them in this order.
First, register the trademark in the country where the company does business. Without it, the company cannot file a UDRP, cannot enter the Trademark Clearinghouse, cannot buy most domain blocks, and cannot use the rights-holder programs on marketplaces and social platforms. The registration is the credential; everything else depends on it.
Then address the domain names. Secure the primary domain with MFA (multi-factor authentication) on the registrar account, registrar transfer lock, and, for the domain the business cannot operate without, registry lock (a registry-level hold that blocks changes until the registrar verifies the request out of band). Register the exact brand in the two or three TLDs where the company actually operates, and put a domain block on the exact string across everything else rather than attempting to buy it all. A block prevents registration across the participating registries without requiring the business to own, renew, or host the domains, which is why we recommend it over a large defensive portfolio for nearly every small company.
Once the domain layer is in place, add monitoring. At a minimum, the business should be alerted when a new domain resembling its mark is registered or when a lookalike’s DNS changes to add mail or a website. Our DNShield domain name monitoring service covers this.
Finally, write a one-page response playbook before anything happens. It should say who is notified when a lookalike or impersonation is found, what evidence is captured (screenshots, WHOIS or RDAP records, DNS records, dated copies of the infringing page), which abuse channel is used first, and when the matter goes to counsel for a UDRP or a demand letter. The playbook turns a Friday-afternoon phishing report from a crisis into a procedure. Our guide on brand protection strategy expands this into a full plan.
When to bring in outside help
Most small companies can handle trademark registration through counsel and routine takedowns on their own. Outside help becomes worthwhile when the company is choosing between blocking products and defensive registrations and does not know which TLDs it is exposed in, a decision that is easy to get wrong and expensive to reverse; when a lookalike domain is actively phishing customers or employees and the registrar is not responding to abuse reports; when a domain has been stolen, which requires registrar escalation and transfer dispute procedures most in-house teams have never used; and when the company is preparing a UDRP complaint and needs a domain history, registrant investigation, and evidence package that will hold up before a panel.
How DNAccess helps with brand protection
DNAccess is an independent, vendor-neutral advisor on the domain name layer of brand protection. We assess a company’s trademark position and domain exposure, recommend the combination of blocking, defensive registration, and monitoring that fits its size, and provision and manage the blocking products we recommend, including NameBlock, GlobalBlock, and BrandLock. We also handle enforcement through UDRP complaints and registrar escalation, and recovery of stolen domains through our stolen domain name recovery service. Our online brand protection services page describes the full program, and you can contact DNAccess to discuss an assessment.