Time is a precious commodity. There is never enough of it. At home, it is a balance to keep up with daily exercise, grocery shopping, house cleaning, doctor appointments and keeping fuel in the car. At work, it is a balancing act of figuring out which issue or project is burning hotter than the weather on the East Coast this week.
I can’t help you prioritize laundry so you have clean socks tomorrow or grocery shopping so you have milk for your cereal. I can offer you some practical tips on how to prioritize your efforts on monitoring & enforcing your brands.
It is often the case in corporate legal environments that monitoring your brands and trademarks is only a small portion of what you do each day. In many cases, it is something that gets picked up when you have a few spare moments or if a fire is raging out of control and getting a lot of internal attention.
When you have a little time and a lot of work to do employing some of these tips may help you make some headway!
1) Team: Build the right team of individuals to support the company’s efforts. Don’t shoulder the enforcement strategy on your own. Invite legal, marketing, communications and any other stakeholders to support the initiative. In recent years, I have worked with many clients who establish an Internet team to help define brand strategy and execute it. If everyone is invested in the strategy, the execution will be much more successful.
2) Strategy: Invest some hours up front to define your brand enforcement strategy. Know what it is important for your brand equity and how to get the biggest return on your investment of time and resources.
3) Prioritization: Don’t sweat the small stuff! It is tempting to get involved and hung up on various brand issues that come up over time. Just because someone is waving a red flag doesn’t mean it should immediately absorb your attention. Evaluate the situation against your policy and determine if it is worth your time and the company’s time. People may not like it that www.annoyingfalseaffiliator.com is affiliating themselves with your brand but in the grand scheme of things does that site or page get enough traffic to do your brand harm significant harm? Is this the biggest issue your brand is facing? Is it worth the chase?
4) Tools: This is advice that my father-in-law has always given: Use the right tool for the right job. Make sure that you are using the right tools to help you monitor and enforce your brands. Make sure they help make you more efficient in what you do and provide accurate information. Be an expert at what you do and rely at the expertise of others to help you with some of the heavy lifting and tools to make your job easier. CSC offers heavy lifting tools to help you find actionable data that meets your branding strategy. We also offer tools to help you monitor and enforce your rights.
5) Time: Do you ever block out time on your calendar for lunch? It is a new trick I have learned over the past couple years because I am often dealing with colleagues and customers that span many time zones. When something is important, you make time for it! Work to schedule a block of time on your calendar to dedicate to your brand enforcement efforts. Sometimes I have to take lunch off the calendar for something more important. This may happen to your efforts to set aside time for brand enforcement but you will notice that if it is scheduled you will most certainly get more time to work on it than you did before!
6) Metrics: The last tip I will give you is to measure your success! Establish metrics to report to the business to show the trends, challenges and success of your efforts.
Someone once told me you can always find time for things that are important in life. Your brand is important to you and your business!
Malia Horine
Corporation Service Company