Having a strong brand is important to small businesses: it’s valuable and helps customers or clients identify you, helps attract and keep employees, assists with advertising/promotion and speaks to your company culture, among other things.
Since your brand is so important and valuable it’s important to take steps to protect it. There are legal issues in brand management to consider, brand protection online and offline and brand protection strategies that can be utilized to make sure you’re protecting one of your most valuable assets.
As with most things, success or uniqueness will attract competition and that creates potential infringement or counterfeit products and services. Having a plan and proactively addressing potential risks and opportunities can help limit some competition and provide your business brand protection. At the earliest stages of innovative product commercialization, brand protection is essential. Don’t wait until it’s too late to start a discussion about brand protection. If you’re reacting to infringement or counterfeiters you’ve probably waited too long, and you’re wasting money and time that would be better spent elsewhere.
Here are some tips to start thinking about brand management and how your business can protect one of your most valuable assets:
External Contracts
- Your business probably uses at least one outside supplier, manufacturer or service in the course of business, so you are going to want contracts to manage those relationships. These third parties can potentially have a negative impact on your brand as well, so you’ll want to control that as much as possible. Contracts are one of the best ways to put stipulations on third parties, and in terms of brand protection you’ll probably want some restrictions on how your product or service can be used. If you’re selling a physical product you’re going to want to know what and who is involved with every step of the product - creation to use.
Employees
- Make sure employees understand how important the brand is to your business. You can also put together an employee handbook that lays out expectations and have them sign confidentiality and non disclosure agreements to help maintain the obligation to protect your brand even if they are no longer employed by your company.
Intellectual Property
- Every business has some sort of intellectual property, and it may be very important to protecting your brand. Common types are trademarks, patents, copyrights and trade secrets. They might not all apply to your specific business, but you should take advantage of any that do. Register the appropriate trademarks and copyrights, file for the necessary patents and protect your trade secrets - these steps can go a long way towards cutting down on potential competition and copycats. Your image, brand names, and original material can be valuable assets.
Non-Disclosure Agreements
- Whenever it’s appropriate, use non-disclosure agreements (NDA’s). This may depend upon the nature of your business, but NDA’s can be extremely helpful in preventing independent contractors and third party vendors from doing damage to your brand. Employees can, and should, sign them as well if the situation justifies it. You’re definitely going to want to make sure key players in your organization sign one. You don’t want the competition taking a key team member who then discloses everything you’ve worked so hard to create and build.
Monitor Your Competition
- You’re going to want to periodically monitor what your competition is doing, and try to stay on top of that so you can address any potential issues early on. One way to help avoid issues is to create strong consumer awareness and loyalty for your brand, it deters competitors from doing something similar or copycatting. There are also online tools that can help monitor and protect some aspects of your branding initiatives - for example, software that can track the use or registration of similar trademarks. It’s not so much how you do it, but finding a process that works for you to occasionally see what the competition is up to, and determining if you need to take any action.
Protecting your brand is important, if you need help with brand management or have questions about what your options are, contact us for a free consultation.