How to Protect Brand Equity

Protecting Brand Equity is Everyone’s Responsibility

Brand equity comes down to protecting the trust people have in your company. That includes what marketing publishes, how employees handle customer issues, how the company responds when something goes wrong, how AI is used, and whether customers can tell when a communication really came from you.

For a small B2B company, a lot of this lands on marketing. They own the website, social media, email, PR, customer stories and half a dozen AI tools. But you still need everyone in the company to help protect the brand.

There is a distinct different between Brand equity and brand reputation:

Brand equity is the value you have built over time.

Brand reputation is what people currently believe about you. A reputation problem can chew away at brand equity fast.

Brand equity can get strengthened or destroyed anywhere in the company

The marketing department can set the standards. The CEO, sales team, customer service, finance and every employee who interacts with customers can strengthen or damage the brand.

I used to describe every employee as a brand ambassador. I think that needs a little more nuance today.

Every employee should understand what the company stands for, what information stays confidential, what they can say publicly, and when something needs to be escalated. Certain employees and subject-matter experts should actively represent the company. Others protect the brand by knowing when to ask before posting, responding or sharing information.

Keep the rules short enough that people will actually use them. A 42-page brand manual buried on a shared drive probably will not save you when something weird happens at 4:30pm on a Friday.

Prepare for a brand crisis before one happens

An investigative journalist group once contacted my company with accusations involving a supplier connected to one of my products and threatened to run an exposé. The next 48 hours included a lot of meetings, digging into the allegations and crisis communication planning across multiple departments. Fortunately, the accusations were unfounded and the story never gained traction.

Do you have a crisis plan in place before something like this blows up your phone or inbox?

You need to know who makes the call, who verifies the facts, who approves the response and who speaks for the company. Role-play a few situations before you need the answers.

And today, a brand crisis can start long before a reporter calls.

A brand crisis can start with a customer complaint that takes off on social media. It can be a fake screenshot, a copied executive profile, a fabricated video, an impersonating website or a false claim that starts circulating before anyone in the company knows about it.

The World Economic Forum has specifically called out deepfakes, hacked accounts and AI-amplified falsehoods as business risks, with early detection and crisis planning among the recommended responses.

You need a crisis plan, but it does not need to be long or complicated. At minimum, answer these questions:

• • Who decides whether the issue is serious?
  • Who confirms what actually happened?
  • Who needs to know immediately?
  • Who can speak publicly for the company?
  • Who handles customer questions?
  • Where should employees report suspicious posts, emails, accounts or content?
  • What information needs to be saved in case legal, IT or another outside expert needs it?

Then set a consistent date on the calendar to run through the plan, ideally once every year. A 30-minute drill is a whole lot easier than figuring it out on the fly when you’re in full crisis mode.

Protect the places where customers encounter your brand

Brand impersonation has become a massive problem.

The FTC reported that people lost $3.5 billion to imposter scams in 2025, with business impersonators accounting for nearly $1 billion of those reported losses. Nearly one in three fraud reports involved some type of imposter scam. Read about it in the FTC data.

For businesses, that means brand protection now includes making it harder for someone else to convincingly pretend to be you:

• • a look-alike website or domain
  • a fake LinkedIn or other social account
  • an email that appears to come from the CEO
  • a fraudulent invoice or payment-change request
  • a fake customer-service contact
  • AI-generated audio or video that appears to feature someone from the company

Make your process simple and crystal clear for employees and customers to report something that looks suspicious. Be consistent about your official website, email domains, social profiles, support contacts and payment procedures. Employees should know exactly who to contact when something looks wrong.

This has become part of safeguarding brand equity because the customer may blame your company even when someone else created the scam.

Proofreading is only part of the review now

I once sent an email to 5,000 subscribers with the product name misspelled.

It had already gone through our normal review process with multiple departments, and every single one of us missed it! That’s how easy it is for your eye to read what it expects to see instead of what is actually there.

I am adamant about having a second or third set of eyes proofread important communications. Ask someone outside marketing to review it. They can spot language that sounds perfectly normal to the people who stare at it every day and completely strange to everyone else. They are also much more likely to catch wording, assumptions or mistakes that everyone close to the project has stopped seeing.

Unfortunately, the publishing process has gotten much longer. Before something goes live, I would ask:

1. 1. Can I support every factual or performance claim?
   2. Are the customer quote, review, result and attribution accurate and approved?
   3. Did AI create or materially change a fact, quote, image, voice or claim that needs to be checked?
   4. Does the content include confidential, personal, customer or proprietary information?
   5. Does the right person own final approval?
   6. Has someone looked at the actual finished version?

Always review the final asset, because a clean copy in a Google Doc can still turn into a broken link, wrong image or typo during production.

Be especially careful with reviews and testimonials

AI has made it much easier to create a testimonial that sounds real but was never actually said.

The FTC Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule took effect October 21, 2024. It covers fake and false reviews and testimonials, and courts can impose civil penalties for knowing violations.

AI can turn a customer comment into a polished first-person endorsement in seconds. Do not put words in a customer’s mouth and call it a testimonial.

If you help a customer write a testimonial, start with their actual words. Interview them, send questions or work from comments they have already given you, or give them prompts. Then send the final wording back to the customer for fact-checking, edits and approval before publishing it.

I cover reviews, referrals and customer advocacy in more detail in 5 marketing metrics every small business should track.

Establish policies around AI before it creates a brand problem

Small businesses must have rules for AI too. Decide what employees can use AI for, what information stays out of it, what needs human review, how claims and sources get checked, and who is accountable for the final work

The NIST Generative AI Profile gives organizations a framework for managing risks including inaccurate information, privacy, information integrity and human interaction with AI. It’s a huge 64-page document, so turn that into a playbook people can easily follow in their day-to-day jobs.

My own Responsible AI Principles say humans remain accountable for decisions and actions made with AI assistance. If something is wrong, misleading or inappropriate, saying “AI wrote it” does not make the company any less responsible for publishing it.

I am also seeing the pendulum swing swiftly against obvious AI-written content. LinkedIn is full of complaints about “AI slop,” and AI-detection tools such as Pangram are now part of the review process for marketers and writers. If everything your company publishes sounds like the same generic AI copy, this does your organization absolutely no good.

I also would establish an escalation policy. If AI touches customer data, a sensitive claim, regulated information, a testimonial, executive communications or something that could materially affect the company’s reputation, someone needs to own the final approval and decision to publish.

I dig further into the organizational side of this in Are CMOs prepared for AI?

Important note: If you do business in Europe, check the EU AI Act

If your company does business in the EU, the EU AI Act may apply to how your team uses AI, even if your company is based in the U.S. The rules include employee AI-literacy requirements and new transparency requirements for some AI-generated or altered content.

For marketers, that means knowing which AI tools your team uses, how AI-generated content is identified or marked, and when disclosure is required. The rules vary depending on how AI is being used, so every AI-assisted blog post, email or social post does not automatically need an AI label.

Read the current EU AI Act text.

The European Commission’s AI Act transparency guidance is a good place to start.

Watch for early signs of brand trouble

Brand issues usually don’t come out of nowhere. Complaints, reviews, customer conversations, sales objections and suspicious activity can all signal that something needs attention. This can include:

The same complaint comes up in several customer conversations.

Reviews are declining.

A customer posts something inaccurate and people start repeating it.

Sales keeps hearing the same objection.

An employee flags a suspicious account.

Referral volume slowly falls.

Keep a close eye on patterns across marketing, sales and customer service rather than waiting for a full-blown PR problem.

Social listening can also catch problems marketing may never hear about internally. In its 2025 consumer research, Sprout Social found that 93% of consumers think brands need to do more to combat misinformation, while 73% said they would buy from a competitor if a brand failed to respond on social media. See the Sprout Social findings.

That doesn’t mean firing off a response to every negative comment five minutes after it appears. It’s ok to use a simple process:

Monitor → verify → assess the risk → respond or escalate.

A genuine service issue may deserve a quick acknowledgement.

A serious accusation requires fact-checking first.

A fake account may need reporting and customer communication.

A troll may deserve very little attention.

Those reasons above are why it’s imperative to have a response process instead of an edict that says every negative comment gets an immediate answer. And when you keep seeing the same complaint, pick up the phone. A ten-minute customer conversation can tell you a lot more than another hour staring at a dashboard.

A gut check before you hit publish

For years, I have always used these two very simple questions before publishing something:

1. 1. Would you be okay seeing this on the front page of a media outlet?
   2. Would you confidently share it with a trusted friend, mentor or even your mom?

Today, I recommend asking a few more questions:

Is the information true?

Can I prove the important claims?

Do I have permission to use the customer story, quote, photo or result?

Did AI introduce anything I have not personally verified?

Is this something I am authorized to publish?

Could a customer tell that this really came from the company?

None of that is particularly glamorous marketing stuff, but neither is spending 48 hours trying to fix a serious brand problem you could have prepared for.

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