To be clear, realize that I don’t have any brands personally, let alone a company or even any good ideas period. But I do know one thing. That one thing is that I would be pretty miffed if someone were to try and bank on my brand or my good idea. Using Competitive Intelligence to Protect Your Brand outlines the ways in which you can use competitive intelligence to protect your brand. So it’s not just a clever title.

The article shows proof of company’s putting their sticky fingers in the cookie jars of their competitors; legally bidding on competitor’s brand names and in essence, swiping their rightful traffic. Although this is a perfectly legal practice, it seems a little sleazy, don’t ya think? To imagine that a specific search for your brand name would only produce less than 100% traffic?

Search Engine Land uses the company Orbitz, an internet travel company, as an example. I’m sure that you can conjure an image, an Orbitz commercial, or their logo; they have obviously done a decent enough job of advertising that people would search for it by name if they were looking for cheap flights, but according to research, 15% of people typing Orbitz into a search engine are being directed to other cheap air fare sites like, Travelocity or Expedia.

Although you can’t really stop people from bidding on your brand, you can rest assured that there are some things that you can do about competitors using your brand in their ad text, like filing a formal complaint with Google or Yahoo.

Be sure to check out the article for more information.