News

What's in a brand? Plenty, if you ask Royal Bank. As one of Canada's oldest and most established financial institutions, RBC has a lot invested
in its brand—that elusive mix of logos, marketing and goodwill that define
a company. The bank even employs a full-time executive to make sure no one messes with it.

Keeping a tight rein on your brand is big business. For big corporations, brand is a highly prized asset that can be worth millions. In some cases, a brand can represent more than 50% of a company's net worth, according to Brand Finance Canada, a Toronto-based consultant that publishes an annual list of the country's most valuable brands (RBC came in at No. 1 again this year). About 53% of the value of the average global enterprise is "intangible," says Andrew Zamakis, managing director for Brand Finance—in other words, everything that makes up its brand. The collective value of Canada's big-bank brands, for instance, is almost $17 billion. At the extreme end is Nike, whose brand represents 84% of its total value.

All of which means brands need to be protected, a job that has gotten exponentially harder to manage with the rise of the Internet. Phishing, spoof sites, phony links, misleading photos—your brand can be misused hundreds of ways online. "At the highest level," says Zamakis, "these numbers put into perspective how important brand equity is and the downside of doing nothing to protect it online."

For folks like Lise Buisson, RBC's manager of brand standards, protecting a brand means a lot more than worrying whether Internet users have cut and pasted your logo onto their websites. In fact, when Web usage began to reach new heights a few years back, she knew that policing cyberspace would be too difficult to handle on her own. "No one realized how easy it was to come to our site, grab our logo and put it somewhere else," says Buisson. "It forced us to sit down and figure out what to do. Since then, we've got the added threats of identity theft, phishing and spoofing. It's a new reality, and you have to put in policies and processes to deal with it. You have to think harder."

So in November, 2003, Buisson called in an expert: BD-BrandProtect,
a specialist in brand monitoring and protection services based in Mississauga, Ontario. According to a recent Gartner report, the market for brand monitoring and anti-phishing services is small—less than $50 million (U.S.) a year. But "early detection capabilities will become increasingly useful to enterprises during the next two years, as online threats escalate."

Buisson certainly understands why. When BrandProtect handed over its first report, she got a rude awakening. "We didn't expect to see what we saw in the reports," Buisson says. "It felt like a tsunami. We were sitting for days on end reading them."

BrandProtect's employees spend their days—and their nights—crawling the Web to identify, assess and report on unauthorized uses of a client's brand, copyrighted images, URLs or links. While some brand-protection companies focus on specific threats, such as phishing, BD tracks brand usage globally, in multiple languages, and checks out link patterns, use of images and logos, and URL registrations. It can also provide follow-up support, analyze data, generate custom reports, send out preliminary warnings, take down offending sites and mitigate potentially damaging activities.

Kevin Joy, BrandProtect's vice-president, says few businesses understand the brand implications of Web-based activities, and even fewer have a real grasp of how to deal with it. "To treat the issue as just a search exercise would be misleading," Joy says. "You also have to determine which action would be a challenge to your reputation. Then you need
to assess the potential damage."

There's also the aftermath to deal with. "If you found 1,000 sites you weren't happy with, how would you go about doing something about it?" asks Joy. "Who do you deal with? You need to be able to track activities in multiple languages. You need to have relationships with thousands of ISPs in multiple jurisdictions, as well as computer emergency response teams. Otherwise, you may not be able to shut those people down."

One of BD's clients, a resources company, had spent three months trying to remove a reference on a website that erroneously stated it was affiliated with the company. Once Joy's team came in, the takedown was achieved within 48 hours. Another client, a consumer-goods company, discovered that a Google Image search for its product turned up an explicit photo. Within two hours, the link was gone.

Joy claims that BrandProtect is the only company in Canada to offer such services on a full-scale, end-to-end basis. The speed of its database transaction processing rivals that of the Nasdaq. The scope of its searches includes 250 million domains, nine billion web pages and 70 billion links while its infrastructure has 32 terabytes of disk space and six terabytes of relational data in an SQL database. It processes more than a billion pages and 10 million categorization records and performs one million manually researched, human-tagged comments a month. Given the amount of information gleaned from these searches, a key to success
is setting priorities before you start.

Brand concerns are the same for most companies, but the No. 1 issue can vary considerably from market to market. A consumer-products company might be more concerned about tracking claims of counterfeit products and ensuring its partners are sticking to branding guidelines, says Joy. "If you're all about family values, like Disney, unearthing links to pornographic sites would definitely be way up on the list," he says. "It's a matter of choosing your focus based on your business needs."

Given the monumental size of the first round of reports for RBC, Buisson can attest to the perils of a catch-all approach. "The first few months, we were reviewing thousands of instances," she says. "It was overwhelming."

Buisson quickly realized that a sizable portion of brand issues were harmless—a charity that includes the bank's logo in reference to a donation, for example, or a real estate agency that has partnered with an RBC mortgage specialist. "At least 90% were innocuous and not worth looking at," says Buisson. "We realized we could narrow the search parameters in order to help us make decisions about what to keep our eyes on and what to pursue. Now we get a list of activities we monitor, and any changes of note on that list are flagged for us."

So if the majority of brand violations are harmless, why chase them down? Because taking your eye off the ball can have huge long-term ramifications. In the world of trademarks and copyrights, where little is black and white, enterprises must demonstrate due diligence in protecting their logos and brands. If they don't, they can eventually lose their rights to them.

Over time, such brands as "escalator" and "aspirin" have become generic simply because no one worked to protect them, says Brian Maynard, who until recently was director of brand marketing for KitchenAid, owned by Whirlpool Corp. "To avoid that fate, you have to show the courts that you have put every effort into protecting your brand. If you don't police your brand, courts will typically rule that the mark is no longer meaningful."

Whirlpool has held the registered trademark for the silhouette of the KitchenAid stand-up mixer since the mid-1990s. "The KitchenAid mixer is an incredible asset," says Maynard, "so it's important to protect both the name and the image from becoming generic." Losing the rights to the KitchenAid mark would be a huge blow, given that the logo carries with it tens of millions of dollars of brand equity, he says.

With the Web reaching audiences in far-flung corners of the world, policing requirements have expanded beyond what most in-house teams can handle. The proliferation of blogs—and recent amendments to fair-use laws in the U.S. that allow journalistic use of copyrighted material without permission—have made the art of brand protection complicated indeed, says Bruce Philp, chairman and CEO of GWP Brand Engineering in Toronto. "Given that people can have an axe to grind and post it on their blog, it's doubly essential to stay on top of this stuff."

Blogging has indeed complicated the picture for enterprises, says Jeff Quipp, CEO of Search Engine People, a Toronto-based search-engine marketing specialist. "Companies can no longer control the message about their brands," he says. "Online brand-search services can seek out in real time what people are saying. Then you can respond quickly—even if it's just a dialogue with a disgruntled blogger."

Philp adds that the Web has also exponentially raised the ante in terms of counterfeit products. "That's been a giant issue with unregulated foreign markets, where knock-offs flood the market," he says. "Doing the same thing in cyberspace is just as harmful."

Knowing how and when your brand is being used online is a learning experience for everyone, it seems. Maynard says that before finding out about brand-monitoring services, he thought he was doing a decent job of policing online references to KitchenAid. "We knew we could do a better job but didn't know how," says Maynard. "When I first heard about BrandProtect, I saw that it solved a problem I didn't even realize existed."