Brand value is a key component of a company’s success and it takes several years to establish by implementing a brand strategy that supports the business. However, in today’s digital environment, brand value can be compromised in a matter of minutes and negatively affect the brand and company. As such, brand security is an issue that needs constant attention to minimise possible reputational damage to the brand and the associated risk of losing customers.

As data hacks occur more regularly, it highlights the need for companies to take privacy issues more seriously as the repercussions of not doing so carry serious reputational damage for brands. According to the IBM 2018 Cost of Data Breach study, if a data breach causes an organisation to lose just 1% of its customers it will cost the business on average $2.8m, and if it loses more than 4% of the customer base the cost is closer to $6m. The costs associated with a data breach are made up of lost business, the negative impact on reputation and employee time spent on recovery.

As such, companies cannot afford to ignore the reputational risk of a data breach and need to have measures in place to maintain trust with customers.

THE ROLE OF COMPLIANCE AND REGULATION

Customers expect companies to have stringent measures in place to protect their personal information and mitigate possible risks of data breaches and hacks. This is supported by the findings of a recent study by RSA Security, which found that more than 57% of consumers blame companies for data breaches rather than hackers. Further, the study states that a loss of customer trust is the biggest risk associated with data breaches and hacks. This should be a key concern for every organisation, as once trust is lost, it is near impossible to win it back.

To alleviate some of the risk, countries have introduced regulations such as the local Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act and Europe’s GDPR, to ensure companies operate with transparency while protecting customer privacy and using data responsibly.  While SA is yet to indicate the fines associated with breaches of the POPI Act, the GDPR has announced two tiers of administrative fines for noncompliance: €10m or 2% of annual global turnover, whichever is higher; and €20m or 4% of annual global turnover, whichever is higher. In many instances, this fee is equivalent to the 2%-3% marketing budget that organisations assign annually. While this should be a concern for companies, the reputational damage of a breach should be the biggest concern for organisations as it is far greater than the value of a fine.

While government compliance and regulations should be adhered to, companies also need to implement their own compliance and risk standards internally to keep customer data secure from possible hackers and third parties.  For example, marketing departments often use website tools to target customers online and share customer details with third party companies to create personalised campaigns. Both of these examples expose customer details to third parties and increase the threat of customer data being hacked.

To combat this, companies need to remove the segregation of duties from a single department and combine the expertise of the marketing, legal and IT departments to build brand trust and mitigate possible brand risks at all times. In doing so, they will be adding additional layers of security to prevent data breaches both within the company and via potential hackers.

INTERNAL STANDARDS

While marketers are generally familiar with the threat of data breaches, in many instances they do not have insight into the particular vulnerabilities associated with marketing data and how to safeguard it. This requires the expertise of both the legal and IT departments to put measures in place to counter the possible risks.

To improve brand security, the marketing, IT and legal departments need to work closely together to combine technology, data management, content and customer experience. In larger organisations, brand security officers have been appointed to focus entirely on protecting the brand reputation of the company. This role is charged with assessing, mitigating and managing marketing risks while looking at issues such as fraud, viewability and transparency. In essence, this role is responsible for guiding the organisation in terms of data security and customer privacy.

THE ROLE OF TEHNOLOGY IN BRAND SECURITY

While technology is a key challenge for data breaches and fraud, it also has to be part of the solution. Governance, risk and compliance software offer companies a solution to address several of the GRC challenges they face by automating mundane reporting tasks and providing a single view of the requirements. However, companies need to also gain visibility into the compliance environment of the future if they are to limit potential risks and threats.

However, companies cannot rely on a single solution to address potential issues and need to safeguard their customer data by implementing solutions that provide internal security standards and equip their customers to prevent possible data hacks and breaches. By using automation software solutions that help companies to deliver consistent brand experiences and provide verification tools in every e-mail, for example, customers are less likely to fall victim to possible phishing scams. However, beyond this, the company needs to also have measures in place to prevent fraudulent e-mails from being sent from within the organisation and minimise the possibility of identity theft.

Automation software presents a solution to help mitigate certain risks by automating tasks according to business objectives and brand standards. This will result in all components and rules being merged into a holistic solution and will remove the segregation of duty from a single department to minimise potential risks to customer data and fraudulent activities.

THE BIG TAKE-OUT

Customers expect companies to have stringent measures in place to protect their personal information and mitigate possible risks of data breaches and hacks.

CONSISTENCY AND AUTHENTICITY BUILD TRUST

While marketing departments are faced with the challenge of capturing the imagination of the customer while ensuring data privacy at the same time, brand consistency and authenticity should be the foundation on which customers establish a relationship of trust. This is achieved, for example, by using primary fonts which can be harder to replicate, e-mail signatures with built-in verification tools and documents that meet compliance standards such as correct director details and company addresses.

To achieve this, technology should be implemented, not only to automate repetitive tasks, but to ensure that the company is able to establish trust with customers in every interaction. In addition, technology should be used to provide a layer of added security to the organisation while providing data and analytics to determine possible risks, mitigate fraudulent activity and gain visibility into how its brand is being used to engage with customers.

Customer trust and a company’s reputation are too important to be left to a single department. To be successful in safeguarding customers’ details, companies must tackle the challenge from various angles and implement several solutions that make it more challenging for hackers to access their information. At this time, technology savvy companies that implement solutions to safeguard their customer data are putting themselves at the forefront of the fight against the competition. However, in the future, this will become standard practice to protect their customers and meet their expectations.

With the fast-paced lives we lead today, consistency provides a sense of comfort that we strive for. Children seek consistency in their everyday lives which helps them to know what to expect from their parents at all times and provides them with the security they need to develop into healthy, confident adults. This need for consistency remains with us throughout our lives and is critical in helping us to build relationships of trust. This is demonstrated in all facets of life, right down to the brands we purchase when shopping. If a consumer trusts a brand, they are willing to pay a premium for it even though there are other similar offerings available to them at a lower price.

Paula Sartini, founder and CEO of BrandQuantum mentions that while technology is a key challenge for data breaches and fraud, it also has to be part of the solution. Governance, Risk and Compliance software offer companies a solution to address several of the GRC challenges they face by automating mundane reporting tasks and providing a single view of the requirements.

However, companies need to also gain visibility into the compliance environment of the future if they are to limit potential risks and threats.

Companies cannot rely on a single solution to address potential issues, they need to safeguard their customer data by implementing solutions that provide internal security standards and equip their customers to prevent possible data hacks and breaches. By using automation software solutions that help companies to deliver consistent brand experiences and provide verification tools in every email, for example, customers are less likely to fall victim of possible phishing scams. However, beyond this, the company needs to also have measures in place to prevent fraudulent emails from being sent from within the organisation too and minimise the possibility of identity theft.

How can your customers trust you if you don’t take precautions to protect their personal information?

Brand value is a key component to a company’s success and it takes several years to establish by implementing a brand strategy that supports the business. However, in today’s digital environment, brand value can be compromised in a matter of minutes and negatively impact the brand and company. As such brand security is an issue that needs constant attention from various departments including the C-suite to minimise possible reputational damage to the brand and the associated risk of losing customers.

Data hacks are happening more regularly today. These incidents impact brand reputation and safety and highlight the need for companies to take privacy issues more seriously as the repercussions of not doing so carry serious reputational damage for brands. According to the IBM 2018 Cost of Data Breach study, if a data breach causes an organisation to lose just 1% of its customers it will cost the business on average $2.8m (£2.1m), and if it loses more than 4% of the customer base the cost is closer to $6m (£4.7m). The costs associated with a data breach are made up of lost business, negative impact on reputation and employee time spent on recovery.

As such companies cannot afford to ignore the reputational risk of a data breach and need to have measures in place to maintain trust with customers.

THE ROLE OF COMPLIANCE AND REGULATION

Customers are often required to provide personal information to companies for a variety of reasons and expect companies to have stringent measures in place to protect this information and mitigate possible risks of data breaches and hacks. This is supported by findings of a recent study by RSA Security, which identifies that more than 57% of consumers blame companies for data breaches rather than hackers. Further, the study states that a loss of customer trust is the biggest risk associated with data breaches and hacks. This should be a key concern for every organisation, as once trust is lost, it is near impossible to win it back.

To alleviate some of the risk, countries have introduced regulations such as the local Protection of Privacy (POPI) Act and Europe’s GDPR, to ensure companies operate with transparency while protecting customer privacy and using data responsibility.  While South Africa is yet to indicate the fines associated with breaches of the POPI Act, the GDPR has announced two tiers of administrative fines for non-compliance: €10 million or 2% of annual global turnover, whichever is higher; and €20 million or 4% of annual global turnover, whichever is higher. In many instances, this fee is equivalent to the 2-3 percent marketing budget that organisations assign annually. While this should be a concern for companies, the reputational damage of a breach should be the biggest concern for organisations as it is far greater than the value of a fine.

While government compliance and regulations should be adhered to, companies also need to implement their own compliance and risk standards internally to keep customer data secure from possible hackers and third parties.  For example, marketing departments often use website tools to target customers online and share customer details with third-party companies to create personalised campaigns. Both of these examples expose customer details to third parties and increase the threat of customer data being hacked.

To combat this, companies need to remove the segregation of duties from a single department and combine the expertise of the marketing, legal and IT departments to build brand trust and mitigate possible brand risks at all times. In doing so they will be adding additional layers of security to prevent data breaches both within the company and via potential hackers.

INTERNAL STANDARDS 

While marketers are generally familiar with the threat of data breaches, in many instances they do not have insight into the particular vulnerabilities associated with marketing data and how to safeguard it. This requires the expertise of both the legal and IT departments to put measures in place to counter the possible risks.

To improve brand security, the marketing, IT and legal departments need to work closely together to combine technology, data management, content and customer experience. In larger organisations, Brand Security Officers have been appointed to focus entirely on protecting the brand reputation of the company. This role is charged with assessing, mitigating and managing marketing risks while looking at issues such as fraud, viewability and transparency. In essence, this role is responsible for guiding the organisation in terms of data security and customer privacy.

Automation software presents a solution to help mitigate certain risks by automating tasks according to business objectives and brand standards. This will see all components and rules merged into a holistic solution and remove the segregation of duty from a single department to minimise potential risks to customer data and fraudulent activities.

CONSISTENCY AND AUTHENTICITY BUILD TRUST

While marketing departments are faced with the challenge of capturing the imagination of the customer while ensuring data privacy at the same time, brand consistency and authenticity should be the foundation at which customers establish a relationship of trust. This is achieved, for example, by using primary fonts which can be harder to replicate, email signatures with built-in verification tools and documents that meet compliance standards such as correct director details and company addresses.

To achieve this, technology should be implemented, not only to automate repetitive tasks, but to ensure that the company is able to establish trust with customers in every interaction. In addition, technology should be used to provide a layer of added security to the organisation while providing data and analytics to determine possible risks, mitigate fraudulent activity and gain visibility into how its brand is being used to engage with customers. 

Customer trust and a company’s reputation is too important to be left to a single department. To be successful in safeguarding customer’s details, companies must tackle the challenge from various angles and implement several solutions that make it more challenging for hackers to access their information. At this time, technology savvy companies that implement solutions to safeguard their customer data are putting themselves at the forefront against the competition. However, in the future, this will become standard practice to protect their customers and meet their expectations.

It is imperative that companies have measures in place to minimise the possibility of reputational damage. Brand consistency is one of those measures.

Several factors cause serious reputational damage to brands these days, ranging from social media to fake news and cyberattacks. It’s therefore imperative that companies have measures in place to minimise the possibility of reputational damage. Brand consistency is one of those measures.

THE VALUE OF BRAND CONSISTENCY

Brand consistency is a vital tool that helps customers and potential customers to recognise a brand and helps to establish relationships of trust with customers. A survey conducted by Investis Digital and Forrester Consulting found that “more than half of businesses see an improved reputation as a result of consistently communicating their brand values”.

When you deliver a consistent experience in every interaction with customers, they know what to expect when they engage with you. It also demonstrates that you take detail very seriously and gives customers confidence that you will deliver quality service to meet their needs.

This consistency provides brand security: should customers receive a phishing e-mail which includes your company logo, for example, they would know – based on previous experience – that the e-mail didn’t come from your organisation.

ACHIEVING BRAND CONSISTENCY

Brand consistency can be achieved only when specific brand guidelines are established, managed from a central department in an organisation and implemented by every employee. These include visual elements such as the logo and font colour, as well as the tone of content used in communications.  However, as employees have access to e-mail and company materials across multiple devices and are able to create personalised customer communication as needed, achieving consistency is a great challenge for organisations.

To ensure brand security, all employees need to know what the brand stands for, understand their role in delivering a consistent brand experience and be committed to delivering such experience in every customer communication. Not only does this help establish the brand’s reputation, build trust and assist in securing the brand, it can even protect customers from potential threats.

EASING THE PROCESS OF BRAND CONSISTENCY

While many companies have brand guidelines and standards in place, sharing these across an organisation and having all employees implement them is a real challenge for marketers. The survey reveals that “only 25% of businesses rate themselves as very effective at consistently managing their brand values across digital channels”.

To ease the process, employees need to be given tools that will help them deliver consistent brand experiences at every customer touch point. All relevant documents, from letterheads to sales collateral and presentations, should be easy to obtain from a central location using the technology that the staff has become accustomed to using daily.

THE BIG TAKE-OUT

Brand consistency in all customer engagements helps to build brand trust and can provide a layer of security for organisations and their customers.

E-mails should be branded with beautifully designed e-mail signatures, and should be written in the correct font type and colour. To provide added peace of mind for the recipient, e-mails should include the organisation’s unique font in the signature, as this is far harder to replicate than ordinary fonts and adds an additional layer of security. 

The content should also be aligned with the overall brand. Employees should have easy access to predeveloped and pre-approved content that can be personalised to include specific client information. Attachments should be branded correctly and need to contain the correct information to ensure brand consistency in all communications and to build brand trust.

ADHERING TO LEGAL REQUIREMENTS

E-mails should adhere to legal requirements such as those in the Privacy of Personal Information Act and the Electronic Communications Act. To achieve this, e-mails that contain personal information should not be shared with external parties but must be sent to the customer only through the organisation’s own internal server.

Disclaimers should be included in every e-mail to protect confidentiality, privilege, copyright and contract information, for example, and to avoid defamation, discrimination, harassment and viruses. Without a disclaimer the company could be faced with a possible lawsuit from recipients.

PUTTING THE BASICS IN PLACE

It should be easy to obtain access to all content and branded materials, regardless of the device or where the employee is based. Branded communications should be managed from a central location. Tamperproof mechanisms need to be built into the system to ensure that employees can’t make changes to documents, presentations, e-mails and other company information without the necessary approvals.

Ensuring brand consistency across employees and devices is a critical task in establishing trust with both employees and customers. It requires a strategic approach. Technology also needs to be implemented across organisations to help ensure brand consistency in all customer engagements, as this can provide a layer of added security for both the organisation and the customer.

Ensuring brand uniformity and accuracy in the digital world.

When Paula Sartini arrives for our interview, I’m momentarily taken aback. She’s wearing a little black dress with a lace overlay and elaborate fluff around the neckline, and killer heels perfect for dancing the tango.

She’s certainly turning heads on a sweaty Joburg morning. Then her make-up artist steps in and moves her hair a fraction so she’s picture-perfect.

It feels like overkill for a friendly chat in a café, but Sartini is the founder and CEO of BrandQuantum, and this time, the brand she’s promoting is herself. Smart marketing indeed. If you can’t make your own brand look good, how can you be trusted with the brands of your customers?

“Brands are built on trust. If you can’t even get your logo right, how can I trust the services you’re offering because it looks like you don’t know what you’re doing?”

Sartini looks gloriously exotic too, and tells me her parents are Argentinian. She’s fluent in Spanish and that Latin speaking style makes her conversation fast-paced and passionate.

A varied background has given her skills in marketing, accounting and art, and she learned coding as a kid when her engineer father brought home an Apple computer and helped her create a game where she calculated the profit on selling lemonade. “I learned the logic of programming, even though I just wanted to play with my dolls because I was really girly. But I’m very grateful now because that logical brain kicked in,” she says. “I’m not an engineer, but I’m very logical and I love statistics, accounting and numbers.”

All her skills have now combined in BrandQuantum, a business she launched in 2014 to help companies protect and promote their brands by making their communications consistent and secure.

She talks about gorgeous fonts and typefaces, and how you can spoil her beautiful design work on a logo by squashing and distorting it. It sounds a little precious, but she explains it well. “Brands are built on trust. If you can’t even get your logo right, how can I trust the services you’re offering because it looks like you don’t know what you’re doing? Maybe you’ll send me the wrong terms and conditions or the wrong information if you can’t get the simple things right,” she says. “If you’re a bank and you write to me in Comic Sans, I wonder if I can really trust you, because what you’re showing me isn’t very believable. It could be the difference between getting the business and losing it if you can’t even maintain your brand.”

AUTOMATE THE PROCESS

The BrandQuantum solution is based on software that was developed for her previous business when she was helping companies take their IT products to market. After about 150 projects, she realised it would be useful to have some software to take what she had learned and automate the process. “The work is quite analytical to determine if there’s a market opportunity. You look at the market factors and the offering, and put all the numbers into the software. Then the process is based on numbers, and not just the egos around the table.”

“One of our big shifts was in our own thinking about what we are, and now we know we’re a software company.” 

When clients call in BrandQuantum, they usually start by wanting tamperproof email signatures and letterheads to help avoid phishing scams and fraudulent communications. As part of the consulting process, Sartini monitors all the communications being sent out, and assesses the logos, advertising material and other corporate collateral.

Then the team can create consistency across all the documentation and store approved, up-to-date versions in a central repository in the cloud. The BrandOffice and BrandMail software give the employees instant access to these standardised communications, and if something needs to be changed or updated, it can be done overnight and the old material will disappear. This uniformity also helps companies meet the compliance, legal and risk management aspects of doing business.

Giving people instant access to the correct logos, letterheads and forms automates those tasks, eliminating errors that come from having old versions hanging around in the system. It also gives them more time to do strategic things like use their judgement and initiative to add a personal touch to their communications. The aim isn’t to stifle personal contact by making people rigidly adhere to corporate protocol, Sartini says.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

“Artificial intelligence and automation is where we want to go, but it must create opportunities to give us more time to talk to people because everyone wants an authentic relationship. One of the scarcest things is human attention,’ Sartini says. “We don’t shrink-wrap everything to where there’s no human intervention.”

In the past year, the IT side of her company has come to the fore, as clients adopting the products are now driving it through their IT departments as much as through the marketing side, and her team works with the client’s technicians to roll out the software and train them to support it.

“Our discussions have become more serious because we’re solving operational issues as well as brand issues. The CIOs are adopting it to solve their challenges and we have to dovetail into their systems. One of our big shifts was in our own thinking about what we are, and now we know we’re a software company.”

There doesn’t seem to be any international competition for what BrandQuantum offers, and Sartini believes the company can win business globally. New York State University could soon become a client, as it’s in discussions to implement the software to manage its brand across all departments and faculties. BrandQuantum has already started to go international on the back of clients with foreign operations, and New York State University would be an important win.

“We can take this South African software international,” Sartini says.