Different Ways of Protecting the Identity of Your Brand

If you have a business then, you must be well aware of the fact that running a business isn’t at all an easy task. You need to take care of different things for smooth business operation and sometimes it really gets overwhelming to manage and monitor every activity with equal attention. On top of that, you need to ensure that the identity and image of your brand always stay protected. The importance of branding identity can never be neglected when it comes to your business growth and exposure which is why it is always vital to make sure that it stays protected at any cost.

Your brand acts as your marketplace identity and in order to protect it, you need to start with proper brand management. Even if your brand simply started out as a service, product or name but, with the progress with time, you may have included a mascot, logo, color scheme and more to appeal to your target audience and gain their confidence. People identify your services and/or products through your brand and thus, it happens to be the crucial part of your business. Protecting your brand usage and maintaining its uniformity across locations as well as products and/or services should be your primary concern. Discussed below are some of the ways that will not only help you to protect your brand but, build a solid foundation for your business.

Copyrights

Whether your business focus on creating unique logos for businesses, brochures or any other works of authorship, it is important for you to have it copyrighted. It ensures that somebody else cannot display your work or profit from it without your prior consent. Another benefit of copyright is that, it prevents any other business from stealing something like a logo from your company. This gives you a unique identity in the market and helps you to distinguish your business from your competitors.

Domains

A website is your primary tool in the present day world to keep your customers updated about the latest developments of your business as well as let them know more about your brand. When it comes to protecting your brand’s identity, acquiring a domain name is certainly a cost-effective way to achieve that. It is always a good idea to keep your website domain short, unique, easy to type, easy to remember and fulfill expectations. For effective branding, you should always consider choosing domains like .com, .net or .org versions. The present day world is flooded with domain names of different types and you need to make sure that the one you choose is available.

Trademarks

A trademark can be defined as a phrase, symbol, word and/or design that distinguish and identify the source of commodities of one party from another. When you register for a trademark, the public gets notified that the specific phrase or symbol belongs to your business. Similar to copyright, it distinguishes your business amongst the crowd.

Patents

When your business comes up with something that hasn’t been produced before then, a patent is the foremost thing you should be concerned about. Patents are granted to inventors so as to stop anyone from using, making or selling the invention throughout the country as well as importing it to the country. However, it is important to keep in mind that patents do come with an expiry date which indicates that, the invention you make stays protected for a specific number of years till the time it is made available to public.

Legal Assistance

Starting from copyrights to patents to getting legal assistance regarding signing of non-disclosure agreements or contracts everything may seem extremely confusing if you are not well aware of the laws. Therefore, at such times, it is always a great idea to hire an attorney or a lawyer for the job to make sure that your brand is in safe hands and stays protected. Before you decide upon hiring an attorney for the job, do a little bit of research on the legal jargons and the rules that helps you to keep your brand protected. Though, hiring a lawyer is not a ‘must do’ for your business but it definitely helps the task a lot easier.

Last but not the least, it is essential for you to consistently monitor the online reputation of your brand to ensure that your brand’s identity remains intact. There are numerous tools available these days that will help you to analyze the opinions of your customers about your brand, see how effective are the marketing campaigns and keep up to date with the recent trends.

Bottom-line

“Offense is the best defense” is the perfect adage that applies to protecting your brand and the best offense comes in the form of a well-cultivated and clear brand identity.