Protecting your brand, is this war ?

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.