 download pdf version of this case study
Royal Bank of Canada and its subsidiaries operate under the master brand name of RBC. With 70,000 full-and part-time employees serving 15 million clients through offices in North America and 34 countries around the world, RBC is the largest bank in Canada. It offers a full range of financial products and services of personal and commercial banking, wealth management services, insurance, corporate and investment banking and transactions processing services on a global basis. RBC also provides services through subsidiaries in the United States and in the Caribbean. According to the Brand Finance Index of Canada’s Most Valuable Brands, RBC ranks as the country’s number one brand with a brand equity value of $5.05 billion, up from $4.53 billion the previous year.
While brand policing has always been a paramount concern for large financial institutions, it has become especially critical with the proliferation of Web activities and blogs. When you have as strong a reputation as RBC’s to protect, the job of maintaining the trust of customers and business partners gets that much larger.
As Manager of Brand Standards for RBC, Lise Buisson knows that the job of protecting the bank’s brand online involves a lot more than finding out when someone has cut and pasted a logo onto their site without permission. “As brands become more valued, any improper use of your brand can become a reputational risk. When someone displays your logo for example, it becomes a de facto endorsement, whether we have approved it or not. We have to be careful about things like that.”
Trust is everything in the banking business, adds Buisson. “People look to our brands with the assumption we will protect them. It’s not about fake products. It’s about harming our reputation through broken promises. Our response to these incidents becomes very important to our partners and our customers. For example, we have mutually exclusive agreements with a variety of properties who don’t want to see our name on a competitor’s site.”
A misuse of a brand on a small website may appear to be “small potatoes” when compared to the potential damage of a phishing or spoofing attack, but keeping tabs on brand usage is critical to instilling that trust. “A brand represents good will and much more and as we see the value of our brand increasing, it becomes important to have in place stricter policies and monitoring around online brand usage.”
Putting it all in perspective
Buisson engaged the services of BD-BrandProtect to monitor online brand usage across its entire portfolio. The BD-BrandProtect service combines advanced technology, round-the-clock monitoring, proven best practices and exhaustive human analysis of all brand-related activities. It scours millions of domains, Web pages and Internet links to uncover infractions. It then categorizes and ranks them according to their severity, as well as initiates proactive and escalating response protocols to threats when required. All information is captured in detailed reports that outline the most relevant and highest priority threats.
After two months of initial setup, Buisson received her first reports from BD-BrandProtect. “We decided we had wanted to look at everything, but these reports were showing thousands of instances of inappropriate brand usage every month. It was overwhelming.”
These initial stages proved to be a valuable education. “We didn’t expect to see what we saw. We were inundated. No one realized how easy it was for someone to come to our site, grab a logo and put it somewhere else. It forced us to sit down as a group and figure out what we could do.”
She quickly discovered that a majority of the infractions noted were harmless and did not require a second thought. “In most cases the users were well meaning,” she says. “It could be a charity site or mortgage partner using our logo. I would say that 90 % of these incidents were quite harmless.”
(Continue) |
 |
With up to 10 brand identities to manage at any given time, RBC decided it needed to find more efficient ways to monitor brand usage online. As Web-based activities began to proliferate several years ago, brand managers quickly realized that monitoring brand activities was a job that was beyond the capabilities of in-house resources. For four years, RBC has been working with BD-BrandProtect to ensure that its billions of dollars of brand equity would not fall victim to misuse and abuse. |
