How Trademarks Can Help You Combat Fake Reviews and Brand Hijacking

The online market has turned into a battlefield. Legitimate companies battle daily against phony goods, phony reviews, and brand hijackers who take advantage of their well-earned reputation. The majority of businesses concentrate on conventional marketing techniques, yet they frequently ignore one of their most effective tools: trademark protection.

Sarah Martinez had to experience this lesson firsthand. After three years of success with her handcrafted jewelry business on Amazon, her sales abruptly fell off. Perplexed consumers were criticizing low-quality knock-offs they believed to be her goods. Even worse, rivals were misleading customers by using versions of her brand name. She didn't understand how trademark registration may have avoided this problem until she spoke with an intellectual property lawyer.

The Connection Between Trademarks and Review Fraud

The connection between trademark law and fraudulent reviews is not immediately apparent to most business owners. The connection is deeper than you might think, though. Slight modifications of well-known trademarks are commonly used by brand hijackers to cause confusion in the marketplace. In order to increase their visibility and harm the reputation of the original brand, they will register similar domain names, produce copycat goods, and then manipulate the review system.

Customers who acquire these fake goods under the mistaken impression that they are purchasing from the real brand frequently post unfavorable reviews on the listing of the genuine business. This leads to a vicious cycle in which the actual company receives bad ratings from subpar imitations that they never produced.

Let's take the example of a tiny electronics company that found more than 200 counterfeit goods under their trademarked name. While real customers were complaining about the knockoffs to the actual company's customer service channels, these fake goods were flooding online markets with phony reviews.

Building Your Defense Strategy

Registering a trademark gives you a number of tangible instruments to combat these dishonest tactics. Above all, it provides you with the legal authority to request that content that violates the law be taken down from popular sites. These rights are usually limited to registered trademark owners, however Amazon, eBay, and Google all have special processes for trademark holders to report infractions.

The act of registering itself serves as a deterrent. Before focusing on a company, skilled brand hijackers frequently conduct trademark searches. Many will move on to easier targets once they see an active, registered trademark. Sometimes the simple act of having protection deters criminal activity, much like when you put a security system sticker on your front window.

More significantly, registered trademarks provide you access to automated monitoring systems that look for instances of your brand name being used online without authorization. When someone produces a new listing using your trademark, these services can notify you within hours, enabling you to take prompt action before phony evaluations begin to pile up.

Platform-Specific Enforcement Powers

Though they all demand proof of registration, the main e-commerce platforms have each created their own trademark enforcement procedures. For instance, trademark owners can monitor their brand and eliminate fake listings with Amazon's Brand Registry program. You are forced to use generic reporting procedures, which frequently don't work, if you don't have a registered trademark.

eBay offers similar protections through their Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) program. Owners of registered trademarks have the ability to swiftly take down listings that violate their rights and even target repeat violators. Because trademark law offers precise legal standards that their legal teams can readily interpret and enforce, the platform takes these reports seriously.

Registered owners' trademark complaints are likewise given priority by Google Shopping and Google Ads. In order to effectively shut off the traffic that phony review operations rely on to maintain their business model, they have the authority to suspend whole accounts that consistently breach trademark rights.

The Economics Make Sense

The initial expenses of trademark registration make some business owners hesitant, but the economics clearly favor protection. Each class of products or services has a basic filing price that ranges from $250 to $350, plus legal expenses if you decide to seek professional assistance. However, it can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars to combat an established counterfeiting enterprise or repair a damaged reputation.

When phony delivery firms started utilizing their name and brand while serving subpar meals, one restaurant chain realized this. By the time they identified the problem, hundreds of bad evaluations had gathered across numerous review systems. Their reputation management campaign cost more than $50,000, which is far more than the initial cost of registering a trademark.