By Vincent D’Angelo
You don’t need to be an Internet business to do much of your business online. Every company needs a stable digital presence to engage with customers, vendors, partners and employees. If you don’t have an enterprise-wide digital strategy for protecting and managing your greatest intangible asset – your brand , then you’re putting your organization’s reputation, relationships and prosperity at risk.
At CSC Digital Brand Services, we come across many companies that don’t manage their digital assets as a holistic brand portfolio. It’s understandable. Because global IP management is complex and digital technologies change so rapidly, brand owners often adopt a piecemeal approach. When a new product launches, a new website goes with it. When a marketing team in one part of the globe has a new promotional idea, they register a social media username. On an individual basis, this makes sense. But each extra building block in the brand’s digital footprint adds complexity (and risk) for the company.
Naturally, managing a digital brand portfolio is determined by the needs and size of the business. Long-established consumer brands operating in many markets, for example, face different challenges to new e-commerce companies.
Whatever the size and scope, though, we’ve identified numerous common themes:
- Digital footprints are getting bigger. They give rise to a ‘shadow’ footprint too: unsanctioned or infringing sites, apps or groups that divert traffic, spread misinformation or distribute malware
- Mobile devices create more immediacy
- Social media increases reputational risk. A small number of activists can cause a disproportionate amount of damage in relation to their size
All organizations can address these challenges by adopting our three-step approach to successful digital brand management. Together with a best-practice guide, I outline our approach in this IAM magazine article*, which we hope you will find informative and useful.
As always, please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any queries about CSC’s services.
*This article first appeared in the IAM Yearbook 2015: Building IP value in the 21st century, a supplement to Intellectual Asset Management (IAM), published by The IP Media Group. To view the guide in full, please go to www.iam-magazine.com.
