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.
