BrandProtect's VP shares five tips for keeping your brand safe in the internet age.

Brand misuse could be the stealth business killer of our time. Criminals could already be siphoning traffic away from your corporate website. They might be tarnishing your brand and robbing clients who thought they were doing business with a legitimate organization. Unless you invest in understanding and protecting against this fast-evolving threat, your business may already be at risk.

In the internet age, the stakes are higher than ever. Consumers increasingly form their opinions of a company through its website. But a good-looking, efficient web presence isn't enough. Companies must protect it or risk losing control over their hard-earned brand to criminal activity.

As director of brand marketing for KitchenAid Home Appliances, Brian Maynard knows all too well what's at stake.

"When you have a premium brand that has been around for almost 90 years, you're held to a higher standard. You not only have to do everything you can to protect it, but you also have to do everything you can to protect your customers."

Online infractions can have grave consequences. Potential customers searching for a brand's products may be redirected to a competitor, or worse, an illegal site. Loss of online control can tarnish a brand's worth.

Maynard says phishing, which represents a dominant threat to brand integrity, is a uniquely challenging threat. Although such attacks may not directly target the company or its online resources, a crime by association is often enough to compromise the business.

"If a consumer is defrauded through a phishing scam that involves the name, consumers still hold us accountable," he said. "So it's important to protect our brand name even if we're not the ones being attacked directly. Just that association in the mind of the customer could be enough to tarnish our brand."

Unfortunately, phishing is only the beginning. Companies need to be aware of -- and be prepared to deal with -- the many ways that their brands are being misused online. From typosquatting and traffic diversion to cybersquatting and domain-level attacks, the company's brand could be permanently damaged by attacks that most businesses never see coming.

Because the potential for damage from brand misrepresentation is so great, businesses must build a strategy that protects their online presence and their customers. Some key steps include the following:

• Be proactive with clients. Add definitions or FAQs for brand abuse to the corporate home page. State explicitly when your firm will and will not use email to correspond with clients, and how they can more effectively differentiate between legal and sketchy messages.
• Don't try to go it alone. Your firm is too busy focusing on its bottom-line business. Brand protection is a highly specialized, rapidly changing competency. Partner with third-party specialists to minimize risk and diversion of effort.
• Plan for disaster. Every business either has or should have a disaster recovery plan or DRP. Add brand protection to the DRP to ensure monitoring and response steps are prioritized and resourced.
• Plan for inadvertent breaches. Not all brand integrity issues are deliberate attacks. Sometimes, channel partners and other known constituents may accidentally breach your trademark and its related terms. Work with brand protection partners to monitor these behaviors and respond to them in a consistent, professional manner.
• Build a 'go team' of staff members who will be activated if the company's brand is compromised. You should also train call center personnel to respond to brand-related threats.

While the internet-based economy opens up opportunities for businesses that didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago, it also opens up new avenues of risk to corporate brands. KitchenAid's Maynard says keeping those risks at bay is crucial to ensuring the future of the business.

"We didn't inherit the land from our fathers," says Maynard. "We've borrowed it from our children. That's the way I feel about this brand name. Everyone prior to me was a good steward for it. On my watch, I'm going to continue to protect it and our consumers."

Kevin Joy is vice president at BrandProtect, a provider of online brand protection services. Read full bio.