E-commerce builds bridges between businesses and customers around the world and speeds up access to new markets. However, brands face great challenges, including the counterfeiting of their products, misuse of their brands, smuggling, to name a few. In response to this, we have prepared some recommendations on how you can protect your brand in digital spaces.
Brand Protection
A Guatemalan company that manufactures and sells clothes and fashion accessories has had great success with one of its brands. Thanks to social media, their videos have gone viral and the public in neighboring countries has become interested in their products. Taking advantage of this sudden fame, they decided to start selling their products on their website and other e-commerce platforms in Mexico and the United States.
The sales during the first few months were pretty good, so the decision to expand seemed to be the right move. But as the company grew, the problems arose. First, the company received comments from customers were they complained about quality problems in their garments, something that did not correspond to the strict control and care they put on their products. They decided to investigate and discovered that unauthorized sellers were offering garments with their brand on one of the platforms. In addition, they detected some models that they did not manufacture but were branded with their logo.
This is a hypothetical example, but it could be a real life situation, as e-commerce has opened a wealth of commercial opportunities for brands around the world. And like any market that grows and crosses borders, the challenges of protecting identity and reputation within a digital environment have multiplied.
Threats in the form of counterfeiting, unauthorized use of brands on social media and Marketplaces, and even cybersquatting –which seeks to register domains similar to those of a recognized brand to capture traffic or even to demand a financial ransom–, are growing every day.
But there is good news: brands have legal tools and strategies at their disposal that will help them protect themselves. Here are some actions you can take if you find yourself in a similar situation:
- Make sure that your brand is protected by registering it in all countries where you currently operate or plan to expand in the future. This should include trade names, logos and slogans.
- Acquire as many domains related to your brand as possible, including .com, .net or .gt extensions, and names similar to your brand so that third parties cannot buy them and use them for illicit purposes.
- Hire a trademark monitoring company to detect infringements and have greater protection in the digital world.
- Include clear clauses in the terms and conditions of your website. Prohibit explicitly the unauthorized resale of your products and misuse of your brand.
- Take advantage of the counterfeit detection and reporting tools that major e-commerce platforms make available to you.
- Take legal action if necessary: send legal notices to request the immediate cessation of improper activities and take legal action in cases that warrant it.
Amazon and its role in trademark protection
Amazon is one of the undisputed leaders in e-commerce. Because of its market position, it has developed innovative programs specifically designed to help brands safeguard their intellectual property. These include:
- Brand Registry[1]: offers tools to manage and protect intellectual property, facilitating the detection and reporting of infringement.
- Project Zero[2]: enables brands to directly remove counterfeit listings, combining machine learning and brand input to prevent infringement.
- Transparency[3]: uses unique codes on products to verify their authenticity, protecting customers from counterfeits.
Therefore, with the support of technology, constant monitoring and good legal assistance, your company will be much better protected in today's open and global market. This will give you peace of mind and will improve your financial results
If you have any questions about how to protect your intangible assets in the digital environment, we are at your service.
