Brand abuse can be used by other businesses, or people to damage the reputation of your business. Costing you not only potential customers but possibly even resulting in the loss of customers.
Brand abuse is an issue that faces every organization. Being able to manage your brand online can be difficult, being able to make sure you brand is being represented correctly can be hard to manage. If you find someone that is abusing your brand it can sometimes be hard to know what you should do; this is where we come in. Site Takedown has been working in the brand abuse environment for over a decade, and we have found the best ways to have content removed that is infringing on a brand.
When working with brand abuse it can sometimes be difficult to tell whether it is brand abuse or freedom of speech. We use our years of experience along with industry experts to determine whether content is infringing on your brand or whether it would fall under freedom of speech. Once we determine that your brand is being abused, we will take action to have the content removed.
Types of Abuse
Impersonation
Impersonation occurs when someone places content online that is speaking on behalf of your business, or is trying to misrepresent themselves as being your legitimate business. Common types of brand abuse would be a site that is similar to yours that has a similar domain, which is then marketing or advertising products or content that damages your business. (Note: impersonation on social media comes under social media impersonation)
False Advertising
This can happen a number of ways, the website or individual might be selling products from your site, without your permission or they may even be framing your website to sell products. They may be selling fraudulent goods or trying to on sell other products before offering the user a discount on illegitimate goods offered by your business.
In these instances, getting the website taken offline is the best bet; as it is easy to see that they have intentionally set up the site for fraudulent uses.
Implied Association
This occurs when a competitor or another business use your branding without your permission to imply that there is an association between your business and their business. While there may or may not be an association between the business, when the branding of their site closely resembles your website, it can be hard for your customers to distinguish between the two; which in turn can cost you customers. If you feel that someone’s site is implying an association with your business that you have not approved, please feel free to contact us to discuss your options.
Misrepresentation
With the increase of online advertising in the last decade, misrepresentation has become a problem when business or individuals will use legitimate brand names in the headers or keywords for a site. So that when search engines like google will display their pages in searching terms next to your own business. This can be a problem when the offending is doing so in the hope of stealing traffic from your site to their own, whether this be for pay per click advertising or to redirect users to other pages that contain surveys or other advertising material.