Marketers’ Concerns About Online Brand Abuse
The digital age has seen a rise in online brand abuse, and whether you like it or not, marketers stand to lose the most from this. This threat not only affects the brand reputation and its worth, but it can also hurt your consumers. These kinds of activities also erode customer trust. When customers do business through unauthorized channels, it has a number of negative effects. Your brand becomes bad news, and your business is prevented from moving forward.
“Branding” and “Hijacking” combines to make BRANDJACKING. The words itself can be defined as unauthorized and unlicensed use of a brand name or trademark. A recent and famous example of brandjacking occurred in March 2010. Environmental campaigners from Greenpeace created a YouTube video that parodied Nestlé’s Kit Kat. The video focused on Nestlé’s use of palm oil from unsustainable operations in Indonesia. The video shows a tired office person opening a bar of Kit Kat. Instead of biting a chocolate stick, he bites a chocolate covered orang-utan finger which begins to leak blood down his face and onto his keyboard. This created a lot of turmoil for Nestlé. People protested by carrying signs with the words “Give me a break” and “Killer” outside Nestlé’s UK headquarters
