Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Protecting your medical tourism brand on the internet...beware the "brandjacker"!

To keep things simple, this blog has moved to the IMTJ web site. You can find the Health Tourism Blog here in future. Here's an extract of the latest blog post entitled: Protecting your brand on the internet...beware the "brandjacker"!"

The internet is a great place to market your medical tourism services but because it is difficult to police, it can be easy for a domain name speculator to hijack your brand. Businesses can find that having spent years developing and investing in a brand, one day along comes a domain name speculator or “brandjacker” who aims to profit from the brand value and customer loyalty that legitimate marketers have built.
“Brandjacking” is difficult to combat; the internet crosses international barriers. When someone hijacks your brand or trademark by registering domain names that are clearly related to your business, it can lead to complex and lengthy legal action to protect your marks. There is a set of guidelines about domain name registrations and dispute resolution published by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) that may be of help. See their Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy .

There’s nothing wrong with registering domain names that you may want to use in your existing or future business activities. I met a group of UK doctors once who had registered over 5,000 domain names related to various types of medical procedure. This was in the early days when you paid over $100 for a domain name! In our web publishing business, we own around 130 domain names... not that many... most of which are in active use for our sites. The problem arises when people start registering multiple domain names:
  • To obstruct the activities of an existing business by incorporating their brand or trademark into a domain name.
  • To divert visitors from an established web site (often by registering mis-spellings of domains).
  • To sell the name back to the brand owner at a premium. 

.........to find out more about "brandjacking" in medical touris, read the full article at IMTJ: Go to Protecting your brand on the internet...beware the "brandjacker"!