9 Ways to Build Buy-In for Modern Brand Protection

Protecting your digital brand used to be seen a legal or marketing problem. But the damage phishing kits, spoofed sites, fake apps, and impersonated social accounts cause go beyond reputation damage. These threats open the door to credential theft, fraud, account takeover, and large-scale security incidents.

If you're on the security side, you're likely already dealing with the fallout – escalations from the SOC, fraud investigations, panicked reports from leadership. The challenge? Getting buy-in for solving it the right way: systematically, at scale, and without adding more manual grind.

Here's how to make the case internally without overhyping or oversimplifying.

1. Connect to Real Incidents-Not Just What-Ifs

People don't buy into hypotheticals. If you want traction, lead with recent events. Show how an impersonated domain led to a phishing campaign, or how spoofed pages are being used to harvest customer logins and bypass 2FA.

If you've got hard data-volume of abuse, takedown timelines, user reports-even better. Show how these attacks affect the SOC, drive up fraud costs, or drag down trust. Keep it real, not abstract.

2. Skip Vanity Metrics. Show What You Can See.

"Takedown counts" sound nice, but they don't mean much without context. What really matters is visibility. Can you see the whole campaign? Infrastructure reuse? Hosting behaviors? Ties to known actors?

Buy-in goes up when you show the impact of playing the long game, this is more than just whack-a-mole. You're mapping the ecosystem and understanding how threats evolve while reacting real-time to individual threats and taking out scammer infrastructure.

3. Automate to Scale, Not Just Streamline

No one wants another system that floods the SOC with noisy tickets or needs constant API babysitting. Reducing the tedious workload is valuable, no doubt, but manually scaling up and down human resources to meet fluctuations in threat volumes is costly and presents additional business challenges.

If your solution automates discovery, enrichment, takedown, and even reporting? That's something teams will use. Show how it reduces work, not adds to it. Ensure the automation solutions you deploy scales across teams and geographies – and enables you to adapt as adversaries pivot.

4. Prove It Can Scale Without Falling Over

Brand abuse isn't a US-only, English-only problem. It shows up in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, on fringe domains, Telegram, TikTok, and app stores you've never heard of.

If your tools break when monitoring the global threat landscape, that's a non-starter. You'll need to show that you can monitor, detect, and act around the clock in any geography, especially when the attacks are outside the obvious.

5. Speed Isn't Just Nice-It's the Whole Game

Every minute a phishing site stays live, someone else gets tricked. Speed to detection and speed to takedown matter more than most people realize.

This isn't theoretical, check out the Netcraft ROI of Phishing Disruption white paper where we highlight the need for faster detection, real-time disruption, and effective takedowns. Our study proved that when you create positive ROI for your brand, you create negative ROI for criminals, and they move on to brands with less sophisticated brand protection programs. Track and share metrics like median time-to-block and time-to-takedown, as well as attacks over time. When you can show that your response times shave hours off active threat windows, thus reducing your attack surface, and that your efforts are reducing how often criminal target your brand, you’re creating measurable value for your business.

6. Accuracy = Credibility

Nobody wants to chase ghosts. False positives create noise and impact trust. Misses create incidents.

Whatever solution you leverage must be operate with precision, especially if you want the SOC, CTI, or fraud team to trust it. Show how your approach minimizes false positives without letting real threats slip through. Bonus points if you can show how it handles edge cases well.

At Netcraft we’ve built our brand protection platform on an evidence-based approach, so that you can know that validated threats are malicious and takedown providers trust our reports. This leads to industry-leading trust, speed in takedowns, and measurable impact when protecting your digital brand.

7. Brand Protection = Threat Intel, Just Earlier

This part gets overlooked a lot. Spoofed domains, fake apps, and social impersonations often come from the same infrastructure as phishing kits, malware, and command-and-control nodes.

When you bring that intel upstream, it helps improve detections, enrich alerts, and tighten response playbooks. It's not a separate problem-it's part of your threat intel feed, just closer to the attacker's first move. The faster threats are identified and confirmed, the more positive impact you can show for the business and the more customers you protect.

8. Metrics That Don't Sound Like Marketing

Don't just throw numbers on a slide. Choose metrics that matter to your org:

·      How fast are we catching and removing threats?

·      What's the trend in impersonation attempts over the last 90 days?

·      What's the delta between alerts raised and threats mitigated?

·      How many abuse reports didn't need human triage?

·      How many clients were protected from threats because of countermeasures being deployed?

Use those to tell a before-and-after story that security leaders and execs can get behind.

9. Find Allies Outside of Security

You'll get farther if this doesn't feel like "just a security project." Legal cares about brand misuse. Fraud teams are tired of customers getting duped and growing fraud expenses. Finance teams want to reduce costs and refunds, Support needs fewer calls and more happy customers. Marketing doesn't want customers blaming them for spoofed DMs and wants to see increase NPS scores.

Bring other teams in early. Let them help justify the spend and share the win. It's easier to fund a program when several departments want it.

Why This Should Be Part of Your Security Stack (Not Just a Nice-to-Have)

Brand impersonation isn't just bad PR. It's a popular and adaptable attack vector. And the longer you wait to deal with it systematically, the more it ends up on your plate anyway, whether it starts in the SOC, IR, or exec escalations.

If you want to run leaner, respond faster, and stop playing catch-up, brand protection needs to work like the best parts of your security program: automated, intelligent, and built to scale.

Whether you have a brand protection solution in place, or now is the time, let’s talk about how Netcraft can help your team reduce the burden of external threats, build ROI of your security programs, and reduce the number of external threats targeting your brand and customers.