Safeguard your Business with Brand Protection & Reputation Management

09 Jul 2025

Published in: Black Country Chamber of Commerce News
Last Thursday, we presented findings from our Quarterly Economic Survey (QES) to businesses across the Black Country. A huge thank you to everyone who attended, as well as our speakers and specialist panel who explored our second quarter theme: ‘Brand protection and reputation management.’

Last Thursday, we presented findings from our Quarterly Economic Survey (QES) to businesses across the Black Country. A huge thank you to everyone who attended, as well as our speakers and specialist panel who explored our second quarter theme: ‘Brand protection and reputation management.’

We were pleased to welcome our QES partner, the University of Wolverhampton, with Dr Kareem Sani as our guest speaker. Kareem highlighted the key objectives that should be considered when developing a strategy. This was followed by a panel discussion featuring a few of our Chamber members:

  • James Garrison, Managing Director from 8848 Agency.
  • Rebecca Cottingham, Director from Eighty3 Design.
  • Kishan Pattni, Director from Freeths.
  • Dr Kareem Sani, from University of Wolverhampton.

The panel discussed the importance of an authentic brand voice, using social media to reach decision makers and the steps needed to develop a comprehensive crisis management plan.

In this blog, we’ll expand on these key themes for those who couldn’t attend our data reveal. We will cover the following topics:

  • What makes up a brand.
  • What is brand protection and reputation management.
  • Why this is essential for businesses.
  • Threats to brand and reputation.
  • The role of digital tools and measuring success.
  • Developing strategies and aligning your brand messages.

By the end of this blog, you will be equipped to build your branding strategy to protect your business. So, let’s get into branding and reputation!

What makes up a brand?


The most recognisable aspects that make up a brand are often its name, logo, and typography. However, branding goes deeper into the heart of the business, it’s about communication, values and the customers. Every industry showcases brands that are unique to each other, and this is demonstrated in the combination of the common and deeper insights of branding.

Even if you’re not actively aware of branding, you interact with it daily. Take a look at Apple and Android, while both do business in the same industry, they differ significantly in aesthetics, values and tone. Brands are everywhere, they subtly influence your decisions based on your preferences and you pass by them everywhere you go.


What is brand protection?


The answer is in the name itself; brand protection involves safeguarding your business’ image from misuse and misrepresentation. This includes actions such as trademark registration and intellectual property (IP) enforcement.

IP stands for Intellectual Property and it refers to the ideas you have and using your intellect to create art. In this case, they would be your logos, slogans and designs.

IP is legally protected with the use of patents, copyrights and trademarks to ensure you’re recognised and paid for what you present to the world.

Another way to protect your brand is to monitor counterfeit activity and you can do this by using digital tools like barcodes and QR codes to make your products harder to replicate. You could also use verification features to show validity of your brand and show you consumers your products are authentic.


What is reputation management?


Reputation is everything in the business world, it influences whether consumers choose to engage with your brand and is often shaped by perception and word of mouth. Word of mouth is one of the best advertising techniques and it’s important to monitor your reputation to prevent a crisis. Ways you can do this include:

Shaping public perception

You cannot directly control how others perceive you, but you can influence it by clearly communicating your values and demonstrating them through consistent actions.

Responding to crisis and feedback

Everyone can make mistakes, but how you respond is what matters. It’s important to address a crisis and take the appropriate actions to rectify the situation. Whether that’s a bad interaction with a consumer or a business conflict, a crisis plan must be put in place to ensure a fast recovery of your business.

According to our data from the QES, 44% of respondents were not prepared or had never considered putting a crisis plan in place.

We hope after reading this blog and understanding the current results from our QES, it can help you address how you can strengthen your business and stay prepared for unexpected situations you might face.

Building trust and credibility

Gather testimonials and encourage customer reviews to build a strong reputation. Having a strong portfolio of positive reviews can influence potential customers to use your products/services.


Why this is essential for businesses.


Branding and reputation are important as they go hand in hand, having a strong brand can reflect authority while reputation can show credibility and encourage more reach.

Consumer loyalty

Having consumer trust can drive loyalty and establishes a strong relationship that keeps them engaged. Making use of word of mouth and positive reviews.

Damage to reputation

A damaged reputation can lead to loss of revenue and customer confidence. Without a clear crisis plan, businesses may be perceived as disorganised or unreliable. We recommend that you consider how you would manage a crisis and begin to create a plan to prepare yourself if this was to occur.

Rebuilding after a crisis

Just like trust, it’s harder to gain once it’s been broken, this is the same for branding and reputation. The fallback is hard, but rebuilding takes hard work and commitment, which is why you should think carefully about how you can protect yourself and your business.


Threats to brand and reputation.


Recognising potential threats is the first step towards prevention. These include:

Counterfeit products

Unauthorised replicas can tarnish your reputation, particularly if they are of lower quality and replicate your branding and packaging.

Negative publicity or social media backlash

In the digital world, posts are permanent even if you delete them, Businesses must be careful with their online presence and respond to negativity appropriately. Ignoring or poorly managing backlash can be more damaging than the actual incident.

Some people may think that bad attention is still attention, but that can be damaging to your credibility, and people may not want to collaborate with you based on your bad publicity.

Data breaches and poor customer service

It’s vital you invest in cybersecurity to keep your technology safe from hackers as they contain important and confidential information. A data breach impacts your reputation and presents an untrustworthy image as you have not taken measures to prevent hackers from accessing your data.

Poor customer service can damage any business; you must understand how to deal with complaints and provide a fast response to customers to prevent an unpleasant customer interaction.


The role of digital tools and measuring success.


Social listening platforms

You can utilise social listening platforms to understand how customers speak about your business as they analyse user generated content that references you or the company. This is a great way to understand how you are perceived and find the current trends in your industry.

AI for sentiment analysis

AI can be a great tool for analysing the opinions of others and filtering them as positive, negative or neutral. It does this by using context of the user’s feelings, opinions and attitudes. This helps you understand your brand’s reputation in real time.

Real-time reputation tracking

Social media management tools can provide real time reports of reputation tracking. This data is gathered through hashtags, mentions and sentiments across all social channels.

Measuring success

By investing in these features, you can determine the success in the messages you want to present to your consumers and how they are interpreting it. This is combined with measuring media coverage and customer feedback.


Developing strategies and aligning your brand messages.


Strategies

There are clear ways to protect your brand and reputation, some ways to protect your brand include:

  • Register trademarks.
  • Use online monitoring tools.
  • Take legal action against infringement.

Ways you can protect your reputation:

  • Proactive communication.
  • Prepare a crisis management plan.
  • Engage with customer feedback.

Alignment

It’s important that your brand is consistent and clear; to do this you must analyse your brand internally, you can do this through:

  • Employee advocacy and training – Ensure your employees have brand guidelines that explain your brand inside and out that they can refer to.
  • Ethical practices and culture – Make sure that your business reflects authenticity through maintaining morale in the team.
  • Consistent brand messaging – Be clear and direct with the messages you want to present, if you want to change your messaging, slowly reflect this change to prevent inconsistency.


Conclusion


We hope you were able to take away valuable insights into the world of branding and reputation, both are interlinked which is why it’s crucial to have strategies in place to maintain them to prevent a crisis. The best way you can strengthen your business is to prepare and prevent before a situation escalates or occurs. The heart of your business is your consumers, and you must cater towards their needs to gain loyalty and trust.

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