Who Uses Brand Protection Software?
Businesses across various industries rely on brand protection software, but the following are examples of fields that need it the most.
Brand owners: Businesses that own and sell well-established brands online use brand protection software to protect their brands against trademark tampering and intellectual property (IP) violations. This includes businesses from sectors such as consumer goods, fashion, luxury brands, technology, pharmaceuticals, and entertainment.
E-commerce and online marketplace platforms: Amazon, eBay, and other major businesses use this software to detect and prevent the sale of counterfeit products from unauthorized sellers on their platforms. It protects their reputation and maintains trust.
IP law firms and enforcement agencies: Intellectual property law firms and brand enforcement agencies use this software to monitor and detect trademark infringements, counterfeit products, and unauthorized use of intellectual property as a part of their client's online brand protection strategies.
Software Related to Brand Protection Software
Online Reputation Management (ORM) Software: With this tool, businesses can track mentions, reviews, or social media conversations related to their brand, products, or services. ORM software manages the online brand reputation by tracking both positive and negative feedback.
Challenges with Brand Protection Software
Brand protection software offers numerous benefits, but some challenges are still inevitable.
Technical threats: Brand protection software uses advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to discover brand abuse. However, an algorithm can go wrong and accidentally flag legitimate sellers. This can result in unintended damage to authorized brand names and sellers.
Untracked threats: New platforms, marketplaces, and social media channels are launching every day. Brand protection solutions with limited coverage might not be able to keep pace with potential threats online. This could result in harm to the brand's reputation.
Evolving threats: Counterfeiters and infringers leverage evolving techniques to bypass detection. Brand protection tools based on traditional anti-counterfeiting technology might have a hard time detecting possible threats.
How to Buy Brand Protection Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Brand Protection Software
In order to stay up to date with the growing need of protecting brands online, it's important for buyers to choose the right software solution that fits their needs. The requirement gathering process helps them understand the specifications of brand protection software tools and whether they are appropriate for their business. Asking a few critical questions can reveal valuable information to buyers.
Once the requirements are shortlisted, the buyer can prepare a request for information (RFI) or a request for proposal (RFP) mentioning all the requirements. Post that, the proposal can be shared with the software vendors to gather information and evaluate their solutions.
Compare Brand Protection Software Products
Create a long list
An initial list is the stage at which a company determines the features its brand protection software must have. These include social media, brand, and domain monitoring, along with smart protection, enforcement, analytics, and reporting. Buyers can add software based on standalone tools, add-ons, or APIs. Some other things to consider are the product's popularity, the price of product add-ons, schemes for upgrading, and customer service availability.
Create a short list
A short list narrows down the long list of software vendors and helps them make a constructive decision on which software to opt for. Short lists are more specific. For example, brand protection software offers different packages based on the number of keywords to monitor or the number of search engines to cover.
Conduct demos
Demos are an essential part of the software implementation process that shows the potential buyer that the tool runs smoothly and integrates easily with the existing business system such as marketplace, e-commerce, and social media platforms. Buyers get a chance to ask questions about the software's features and evaluate whether the vendor is entirely transparent about its product.
Selection of Brand Protection Software
Choose a selection team
A team of in-house IT personnel, project managers, heads of departments, e-commerce experts, and end users should be part of the selection process. Along with senior management, this group is responsible for picking the best software and handling the entire onboarding process. Buyers can also outsource technical consultants with domain-specific expertise to get constructive recommendations and suggestions.
Negotiation
To successfully negotiate, the buyer analyzes the final offer from two or more brand protection software vendors. Chances are that vendors might offer similar software with similar features. In this case, the only differentiator may be the price. If the price is in the same range, the deciding factor might depend on product add-ons, unique customization, or customer support.
Final decision
After the vital step of investigating all the vendor's terms and conditions to avoid any last-minute confusion, usually senior management decides on the software after carefully examining the documented insights provided by the team during the testing process.
