We all know that securing your perimeter and your internal assets only gets you so far today. The crux of the issue is that your brand, and potential threats to it, are now often external and out of your direct area of control. The number of places and channels online where your brand appears and where malicious actors discuss how to take down your organization is expanding rapidly today.

Websites, media outlets, search engines, marketplaces, social networks, forums, mobile apps, online ads, and more – these are all places where your brands, products, workers, and affiliates and other associated third parties can be mentioned in inappropriate or malevolent contexts: They increase opportunities for brand defamation and data leakage; they act as discreet places to conspire or collude; they open the door to new security vulnerabilities; they decrease your control over your products; and they make it harder to spot contract violations and breaches.

 

The good news is: You’re not powerless either.

We just published our Forrester report Market Overview: Brand Monitoring And Protection, and we go into detail about how you can use these same public data sources to your advantage – to proactively monitor your brand more holistically, analyzing and correlating larges sets of information, and uncovering trends that ultimately mitigate risk and help meet a wide set of risk and compliance objectives. In fact, we identified 10 unique risk scenarios every organization can manage to better protect their digital brand. These risk use cases range from domain, trademark, and licensing contract enforcement to reputational risk monitoring to corporate, event, and executive security – and seven more!

In this BMP Market Overview, we reviewed the capabilities of 17 BMP vendors and uncovered a landscape where we found vendors typically fall into two categories:

  1. Brand compliance monitoring vendors: These vendors facilitate entity-level monitoring and enforcement actions, handling issues where a company is represented as an entity online – through their brand names, logos and other brand property –  in both fraudulent and legitimate occurrences.
  2. Social risk monitoring vendors: These vendors provide capabilities to scan human interactions online at broad, macro levels, analyzing patterns and behavioral trends to track and identify anomalies that may have potential risk implications for the organization.

Vendors in each category offer products and services that can help you with each of the 10 risk objectives. Selecting the right vendor to meet your needs will depend on a number factors, including which risk objectives you want to prioritize, whether to outsource or dedicate internal resources, which data sources vendors can scan and at what frequency, and a host of other considerations.

There’s a lot to go through and process, but if there’s one thing to emphasize, it’s that building a formal, comprehensive brand protection function that addresses a broader set of risk objectives is an initiative that will only grow more critical for your organization as the number of online channels that expose your organization continues to proliferate.

Be sure to check out this new Forrester report, Market Overview: Brand Monitoring And Protection, and reach out to me (@NickHayes10) as you begin to embark on this process and build out your brand protection function at your organization.