Brandjacking and ways to prevent it

1. Brandjacking and what steps should
companies take to safeguard against it.
Presented by –
Ronil Sinha
Sairam Ramkumar
Saurav Chaudhury
Shreya Sharma
Valene Varela

2. AND HOW TO STAY
SAFE FROM IT!

3. WHAT IS BRANDJACKING?
 Brandjacking is an activity whereby someone
acquires or otherwise assumes
the online identity of another entity for the
purposes of acquiring that person's or
business's brand equity
 The term combines the notions of 'branding'
and 'hijacking', and has been used since at
least 2007 when it appeared in a Business
Week article
 The tactic is often associated with use of

4. TYPES OF BRANDJACKING
1) Identity
impersonation
 Facebook and
Twitter are breeding
grounds for fake
profiles
impersonating
celebrities and even
regular people
 Done to gain
personal information
of users

5. TYPES OF BRANDJACKING
2) Cyber-squatting
 When someone buys a URL (website
address) in anticipation that you'll want to buy
it off them at some point in the future
 Buying up URLs in the names of new limited
companies or extensions that existing
successful organisations did not have the
presence of forethought to secure (such as
.org, .com, .co.uk, .net) can be very profitable
 Definitely considered to be immoral
profiteering

6. TYPES OF BRANDJACKING
3) Phishing
 Technical cat-burglars
raid your database
and glean personal or
financial data that they
can then use against
you or your customers
 Biggest motive ->
credit card information
 Secondary motive ->
To steal passwords
and access accounts
 Private information is

7. MOTIVE BEHIND BRANDJACKING
 A brandjacker may attempt to use the
reputation of its target for:
 Free publicity
 to malign the reputation of its target
 “innovative marketing”
 The effects on the original brand-holder
 Financial loss
 Credibility loss

8. SOME HIGH PROFILE HIJACKINGS –
BURGER KING
 Burger King’s official
Twitter handle
@BurgerKing was
hijacked and
adorned with
McDonald’s
• Apparently their password was “whopperr123”
branding on
• A faction of Anonymous claimed responsibility
February 18
• After more than an hour, the handle was
suspended

9. SOME HIGH PROFILE HIJACKINGS –
BP
 During the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010
the Twitter handle @BPGlobalPR gained a huge
following – almost 10 times the number of followers
of the official @BP_America account – and
frequently parodied their response (and lack
thereof) to the disaster.

10. 8 STEPS TO PREVENT BRAND-
JACKING
 Sign-up for leading social media sites, which
includes all well-known sites along with the
ones which apply especially to the Line-of-
Business e.g. Media, Entertainment , Travel.
 List out all brand names that need to be
protected – company name, product-names,
characters, spokespersons, other IP and sign-
up for user names using each of these brand
names. Wherever possible, create user
communities on a site.

11. 8 STEPS TO PREVENT BRAND-
JACKING
 Define the company department which is
responsible for brand presence on Social Media
and entrust them with active site-monitoring and
creation and promotion of user communities
around the brands.
 Engage customers, fans and users actively and
positively on social media by having logos for
approved fan sites, customer service sites and
regular status updates. The goal is to create a
sense of close-knit community to gain positive

12. 8 STEPS TO PREVENT BRAND-
JACKING
 Always plan for the future. All products, brand
names, characters or other public names that
affect the IP of the organization should be
registered everywhere before they become
public.
 Supervise employees who are using the brand
names or other IP in social media to keep a
positive image, avoid misleading acts, and
ensure that the marketing and legal
departments are always kept in the loop.

13. 8 STEPS TO PREVENT BRAND-
JACKING
 In case of an IP infringement, the fight to
recover brand rights should be a low-key effort
and the offender should be treated tactfully &
facts should be validated extensively to prevent
negative publicity and a potential PR disaster.
 Finally, the single most critical tip to prevent
brand-jacking is “ETERNAL VIGILANCE” of the
Intellectual Property on the Internet.

14. COMPANIES WHICH DID IT RIGHT -
COKE
 Coke has the highest brand equity among all
the companies world wide. Every year it
spends billions of dollars in order to maintain
its brand value
 According to the page data Coca Cola fan
page is the second most popular page on
Facebook with over 3.3 Million fans, only
second to Barack Obama
 However, this page wasn’t created by Coke,
but by two Coke fans in Los Angeles, Dusty
Sorg and Michael Jedrzejewski.
 Instead of acting against brand jacking – the
officials at coke contacted them to partner
with coke to manage their page
 Facebook made the decision to either close
the page or let Coca-Cola take it over. Coca-
Cola instead proposed an alternative: Let the
creators keep the page but share it with a few
of Coca-Cola’s senior interactive folks…

15. PINSTAGRAM
 Some times brandjacking helps both the
parties. One of the latest example for this is
the new application that is created –
Pinstagram
 Pinstagram is a hybrid application that is half
social pinning site Pinterest, and half photo-
sharing app Instagram
 The simple combination of the two apps has
created an entirely new offering, while
hijacking both brands.
 instagram gets downloads as people
respond to its unique product, while
Instagram and Pinterest receive more traffic
as a result.
 “Pinstagram has jacked Pinterest and
Instagram in a way that’s complicit with the
other two. It’s a homage to the other brands,
and it’s useful to both brands as it drives

16. HOW TO SURVIVE A BRAND HIJACK?
 Notifying our customers immediately
 Reporting the phishing site to the company hosting
it
 Putting out a press release
 Well defined plan to help affected customers
 Proper communication within the organization
 Filing a report to the Internet Authority of the
respective country

17. SHELL’S STORY
 Generally oil companies get targeted by environment
activist groups such as Greenpeace
 Shell was also not spared
 Problem for Shell was such activist groups took over
Shell’s social media space
 The fake pages started getting more attention than
Shell’s original pages
 How did Shell react to this accusations against some
oil spills?
 Analyzed the situation, by not allowing itself to be the
center of trolls