What actually stops a competitor from copying your product and outranking you for your own name? Most small businesses never ask until it happens. Mark Burnett, the founder of MyBrainRestore, asked early, and his answer on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast is a useful checklist for any founder who sells a physical product online.
Mark spent his career as a database programmer, including contract work for the US Patent and Trademark Office, before he started a single-ingredient supplement company at 67. Here’s how he set up his brand defenses before anyone tried to get past them.
Turn on the marketplace’s protection, and know it exists
Mark found out about Amazon’s brand protection by accident. When he applied to sell there, “they wrote me a letter basically saying, We’re protecting your brand.” Any other listing that uses his brand name gets knocked off automatically.
Well, the truth is that a lot of sellers never get that letter, because they never register the brand. If you sell on Amazon, enroll your brand in Brand Registry before you scale. It’s the cheapest defense you’ll ever get, and it protects the search results for your own name inside the biggest product search engine there is.
File your own trademarks, on the names and the methods
Mark didn’t stop at the marketplace. “So I knew how to file patents and trademarks. So I did.” He filed on his techniques and on the names of his products. That’s the piece that makes a cease and desist letter possible, and Mark says he hasn’t had to send one because nobody has figured out how to copy his process.
You don’t need a USPTO background to do this, but you do need to do it before you’re visible. A trademark filed after a competitor starts using your name is a fight. A trademark filed first is a letter.
First to market is a branded-search moat
Mark’s second line of defense is timing. “Once you have the market and you’re first to market and you’ve got a brand for yourself, it’s gonna be really, really hard for someone to bust into your level.” He compared it to a well-known category leader: people search the brand, not the ingredient.
That’s an SEO point as much as a business one. When customers search your brand name instead of the generic product, you’ve stopped competing on the generic query. You can actually watch that happen. When you decide which keywords to track, put your brand name next to your top generic query, and look at branded impressions in Search Console every month. When branded demand grows faster than generic, the moat is working.
Make the process the hard part to copy
Mark had to invent his own cold-milling process, because standard cold milling “can still get up to like a hundred and twenty degrees” and he needed to stay around fifty. Competitors who sell the same raw ingredient prepare it differently, so they aren’t really selling the same thing. A process that’s hard to reproduce is a moat no keyword research can give you.
Your brand defense checklist
- Register your brand on every marketplace you sell on before you scale.
- File trademarks on product names and, where it applies, your methods.
- Track branded search separately from generic search, every month.
- Document the process that makes your product different, and keep it in-house.
Which of those would you be scrambling to do if a copycat listed your product tomorrow? Start with that one. For the full conversation, including how Mark rewrote his business plan “a hundred times” and why he won’t give up 51% of his company, read the Unscripted Small Business recap, or Jeremy’s take on founder control and investors.
This article is about brand protection and marketing. It is not medical, health or investment advice, and SEO Arcade makes no claims about any product.