Luxury brands ‘not doing enough’ to protect themselves online

Luxury brands are not doing enough to engage with online platforms to promote and defend their brands, a report has claimed.

The claim was published in brand protection company NetNames’s “Digital Brand Risk Index” report published today, September 14.

NetNames compiled a list of top brands, based on Interbrand’s ‘Top 100’ list, and used its Discovery Engine (DEX) methodology to help with its findings.

A DEX score is used to assess the coverage of a brand online.

A high DEX prominence shows how often a brand is mentioned, whereas a high DEX sentiment shows how often a brand is mentioned in a positive light.

The DEX scores were calculated between February 26 and March 6.

NetNames analysed 57,000 of the highest ranked web pages related to the brands that were based on search-engine searches featuring keywords connected to the relevant industries.

Amazon, Sony and Facebook were among the top three brands displaying a high DEX sentiment score. The most popular industries were technology, computing and electronics.

Luxury brands, the report found, showed a low level of prominence online, but also demonstrated high levels of negative sentiment.

“Generally low levels of online prominence suggest that luxury brands are still not utilising these channels enough, while the relatively high levels of negative sentiment for those that are more prominent suggests that they are not protecting their digital domains effectively,” the report said.

The report warned that luxury brands “can become victims of their own success” if they fail to “pay careful attention” to threats from social media and abusive registrations.

It added that there are more than 20 million fake Twitter accounts in existence and that brands with high DEX sentiment scores are the “clear choice for fraudsters”.

Gary McIlraith, chief executive of NetNames, said: “A brand’s power comes from its recognition and the opinion people have of it. Increasingly, those two factors are being determined online. This makes it essential to understand how your brand is perceived, what’s being said about it, where and by whom.

“The speed, ease and anonymity with which fake websites can now be created means brand reputations can be tarnished in front of a global audience at little risk to the malicious actors willing to fraudulently exploit trademarks,” he added.