For every owner of businesses, brand protection is always considered. How can you do this? One effective way of doing so is web scraping. Find out more here.
In today’s hyper-competitive industry, protecting your business brand is of utmost priority. Proper brand protection will prevent other individuals from stealing your ideas and having your products plagiarized for profit.
In this article, we’re going to look at why today’s businesses should heavily invest in proper brand protection and one way they can effectively do so web scraping. If you wish to further enhance your business’ operations and its potential, read on to find out more.
Why Should Modern Businesses Think About Brand Protection?
Brand protection is essential for a business’ survival in the long term. It can be described as a layer of security that protects your brand’s intellectual property from counterfeiters, infringers, and pirates. It can take years of hard work and sweat to build up a business. But all it takes to lose all that hard work is someone that successfully steals your intellectual property and becomes more popular than you, the original.
Don’t let your life’s work and future get squandered by ill-intentioned people. Not only will proper brand protection safeguard your business’ intellectual property and revenue, but it will also protect your company’s reputation, image, and value as a whole.
In short, brand protection can help you fight off-brand exploitation. Now you know what brand protection is and what it does for a business. As for brand exploitation, below are some simple examples of obvious brand abuse. It has many forms but here are a few common examples;
- Patent Thievery.
- Fake Websites.
- Social Media Impersonators.
- Counterfeiting.
Businesses must avoid these situations as much as possible and this is where brand protection comes into play. At first, it might feel good knowing that your business is big enough to warrant copycats running around. As the famous saying goes, “Imitation is the highest form of flattery.” However, the longer counterfeits and copycats run around without consequence, the bigger the problem will become later on.
Customers will start buying fake products from counterfeits without realizing it, and then blame your company for the poor quality. This will result in reputation loss and various legal fees when trying to track these counterfeiters and removing them.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to utilize brand protection methods to avoid these unwanted situations. One of the most effective and fairly easy ways to prevent brand theft is web scraping. Let’s look at what it’s all about.
What is Web Scraping?
Each website on the internet has plenty of invaluable public data. This data can be harvested, copied, and stored in different storage by web scrapers. Web scraping can be used for the benefit of a business. This is sometimes called ethical web scraping. Ethical web scraping has been used for various beneficial online operations, some examples are;
- Market research.
- Ad verification.
- Product page intelligence.
- Travel fare aggregation.
- Email protection.
- Price monitoring.
- News monitoring.
- Lead generation.
These are only a few of various ways web scraping can be used to benefit a business while not undermining another. Proper and ethical use of web scraping can enhance the business and its brand-protection strategies.
Web scraping operates through two parts working together, the crawler and the scraper. In layman’s terms, the crawler “crawls” and searches the internet for the requested data to be extracted. The scraper follows behind the crawler, scraping the data quickly and effectively. Picture a horse and cart, where the crawler is the horse and the scraper is the cart.
That’s the oversimplified explanation of how web scrapers work their magic. Let’s look at how exactly web scrapers help in monitoring potential threats to your business.
How Can This Help Monitor Potential Threats?
You can use web scraping to effectively build your brand while keeping the business safe from other attackers. There is something the industry calls “web scraping for reputation management online.” This is also known as “web monitoring for brand protection”.
You can use web scrapers to track down fake negative reviews on your website, counterfeits, copyright infringements, etc. and take down these malicious activities. For example, we all know that feedback is important for a business, but fake feedback by malicious reviews or trolls is very damaging to your reputation online. However, the goal is to not take their own. Instead, you should see what the people are saying about your business and point out the fake ones.
You can reply to these fake reviews by telling any oncoming lookers that their review is not valid.
Conclusion
We hope that you learned something new about brand protection and how important it is for your business as a whole. Web scraping can be used to enhance your brand awareness and security.
