Online Brand Protection: How Brand Bidding Affects Your Branding

We call it brand protection the entire set of strategies and tools aimed at protecting a brand's reputation. For this reason, it is common for companies to invest a good portion of their time and resources into these actions.

However, many of them focus solely on visual identity and overlook an important point frequently exploited by unfair competitors: ads. That’s where brand bidding, an unethical ad hijacking tactic, arises and threatens the results of your sponsored campaigns.

But what are the threats behind brand bidding, how do they affect your brand protection, and more importantly, how can you keep your brand safeguarded? Join Branddi and follow along with this article!

Why is brand protection important?

Before we talk about brand bidding and its relation to brand protection, it’s important to understand what online brand protection is and why it has become so relevant for companies. Proof of this is the increasing number of trademark and patent registrations, according to the Bulletin of the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI).

However, while essential, registration is only the first step in brand protection, which also involves many other actions. But why, after all, has this protection become such a key element in the corporate world?

Preserving reputation

A brand’s reputation is its main driver for growth and sustainability. After all, it is through reputation that a company builds relationships with its consumers and partners and expands its audience, increasing revenue. In other words, it's understandable that maintaining a positive reputation is a brand’s main focus, right?

This is where online brand protection comes in, creating actions to prevent your brand elements from being associated with low-quality products or services. Such associations can harm your market image and consumer trust.

Protecting investments

Every entrepreneur knows that building a brand requires time and investment. Therefore, it’s only natural for companies to want to protect these elements as a way of safeguarding their efforts against malicious competitors.

In this case, brand protection becomes an essential resource to prevent the investments made in the company from being misused or diverted, leading to financial losses and the possibility of lengthy, costly litigation.

Market differentiation

Increasing profit and visibility is undoubtedly one of your business’s main goals, right? Well, know that brand protection can help you achieve that too!

A well-protected brand is also more capable of reallocating investments to other areas. As a result, it stands out in terms of innovation, quality, and productivity — in other words, it rises above its main competitors and wins consumer preference.

This differentiation also positively impacts company results, increasing profitability and popularity in the industry.

Legal compliance

Brand protection is also closely linked to your company’s legal compliance. After all, it ensures that you hold exclusive rights over the use of your brand and prevents lawsuits involving your exclusive elements.

Not to mention, it ensures that your brand is up to date with its legal obligations.

Brand bidding and online brand protection: how ad hijacking threatens your brand

First, we need to understand what brand bidding is. In short, brand bidding is an unethical strategy involving the hijacking of sponsored ads by competitors or partners. This is done by using the affected company’s keywords and institutional terms in third-party campaigns.

The goal is simple: redirect and “steal” organic conversions through search engines, taking positions and placements that rightfully belong to the original brand.

Among the consequences this action can bring to your business, we can mention:

• Increased institutional CPC (Cost Per Click);
• Loss of sales;
• Consumer confusion;
• Reduced growth potential;
• Less effective campaigns;
• Possible legal expenses due to litigation.

Knowing all these negative consequences, it’s natural to want to shield your brand against brand bidding. Keep reading to understand how to strengthen your brand protection with Branddi’s help!

How to protect your brand from brand bidding

As we’ve seen throughout this article, avoiding brand bidding is directly related to enhancing your brand protection. After all, eliminating brand bidding from your list of concerns allows your brand to gain time and resources to invest in a complete and integrated protection strategy.

As specialists in digital brand protection, we at Branddi want to help you with this goal. Check out three basic steps to protect your branding from unfair competition!

Step 1: Register your trademark

When we say that trademark registration doesn’t guarantee your company’s safety in the digital space, we’re not saying it isn’t important. On the contrary: registering your trademark is the first step to a solid company!

To do this, you can conduct a detailed search for the trademark in question in the INPI’s database and request registration. If you want more details, we have exclusive content on the topic!

Step 2: Build a relationship with your consumers

Building a trust-based relationship with your consumers and partners is key to successful online brand protection. After all, consumers are not just potential buyers — they can become loyal advocates of your business.

That’s why you should always aim to build transparent relationships and unify your communication and sales channels to prevent unfair companies and competitors from capturing your audience’s attention and preference.

Step 3: Actively monitor brand-related terms

Finally, when talking about combating brand bidding, we must highlight the importance of actively monitoring exclusive terms. That’s because most brands only notice the impact of unethical actions when results like increased CPC or poor campaign performance have already occurred.

Brands that continuously monitor their terms and competitors, on the other hand, can detect these anomalies early on, preventing them from becoming more serious problems.

Prevent brand bidding from weakening your online brand protection with Branddi!

Here at Branddi, we work with cutting-edge technology combined with AI to provide your brand with in-depth monitoring on Google Search and Google Shopping. Our system simulates different locations, times, and devices globally, identifies unfair competitors, and reaches out through extrajudicial notifications.

Our approach, besides being cost-effective in the long run, also delivers fast and solid results: we reduce your institutional CPC by up to 70% and increase 20% in organic clicks.

In addition, we reduce your brand’s litigation costs by up to 90% through a practical and amicable resolution process.

Want to make your online brand protection even stronger? Count on a partner with expertise in corporate protection: count on the Branddi team!