It’s no longer enough for luxury fashion houses to passively defend themselves against cybersecurity risks. Building a resilient brand today requires an aggressive defense, in which businesses proactively test their system for vulnerabilities and monitor and investigate the latest threats. This can prove a particular danger in the luxury sector.
Valuable brands can be vulnerable
Successful, valuable luxury brands aren’t immune from attack. If anything, they are more likely to be targeted by cybercriminals seeking to gain maximum financial benefit from their attack.
Hackers can launch ‘spoofing’ attacks against reputable brands in a way that seeks to exploit these brands’ existing credibility, including creating lookalike domains, fake websites and bogus social media profiles, which can cause significant harm to businesses and their customers by stealing traffic and money.
For luxury, a digital brand protection solution becomes a key aspect of defending against impersonations – whether that’s a fake domain or a counterfeit product – that can pose financial and security dangers.
Building a strategy for cybersecurity and personalization at scale
Investing in cybersecurity offers more than the obvious benefit that it helps luxury brands prevent these cyberattacks. Building a resilient business is also key to earning consumer trust, which results in shoppers being more willing to share their personal data in a way that allows luxury businesses to launch personalized marketing campaigns at scale.
For most luxury brands, this will initially involve getting security and privacy right when it comes to digital marketing applications and systems. Leading luxury companies are using this process to more widely assess how data is being used across their people, processes and technology. By incorporating a security focus into their application development, retailers are minimizing their risk of missing opportunities because of security concerns.
Personalize security and privacy for the consumer
The luxury sector can build on this by placing data-protection controls for consumer-facing applications in the hands of the consumer. This improves the customer experience without harming underlying security and privacy.
By collaborating with expert partners, there’s the opportunity to maximize convenience while measuring performance through widely available customer experience dashboards, such as net promoter scores (NPS). This lays the foundation for building security and privacy into applications in a way that can be refined quickly and iteratively.
Eliminate the noise
Getting to this point relies on cutting-edge expertise combined with the very latest solutions. The overwhelming amount of data on the web means businesses can struggle to sift through potential findings and identify truly malicious activity, such as spoof websites and fraudulent use of their brand identity.
As a result, it’s crucial to gain insight into the true nature of existing and emerging threats through threat intelligence. Proactive monitoring of the dark web paired with the latest digital brand protection solutions, using machine-filtering technology, helps safeguard brands by identifying genuine threats and protecting business reputation.
The current landscape means there’s never been greater opportunity for luxury houses to launch personalized marketing campaigns at scale. The good news is that collaboration – combined with smart investment in digital brand protection – can safeguard profits, improve marketing effectiveness and enhance the consumer experience.
