Thursday, 20 December 2012

Avoid Counterfeit Products from Reaching Consumers


Every organization is sensitive and cautious about its brand, as brand is much more than a mere name or trademark. It is an organization’s identity and reflects its core traits and intrinsic values. Therefore, any brand image or reputation violation results in losses, both finite and infinite. The internet and its latest advancements have benefited brand development in multiple ways. Similarly, it has also given rise to a set of perils that includes brand and product duplication, counterfeiting, gray market sales to name a few.

Most generic brand protection solutions available today are not equipped with inbuilt product anti-counterfeiting features. They merely scan the internet for any kind of brand and trademark abuse. Product counterfeiting leads to revenue losses followed by brand erosion. For example, in the luxury retail, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies, where loss margins are high, the visibility to detect the products that are being counterfeited along with price discounts, becomes crucial in order to halt brand erosion and ongoing monetary losses. In order to aid this situation companies specializing in online brand monitoring have introduced anti-counterfeiting solutions providing 24x7 instant monitoring to detect the brand violators.

Advanced anti-counterfeiting solutions are equipped with innovative search capacities and are appropriately designed for a detecting counterfeits across industry verticals. It helps to track brand violators and respond accordingly. The suspect criteria are however not same for every industry. For example, in case of high-tech industry where products are sold at a high discount, more than 50 percent are suspects. Contrarily, in the pharmaceutical industry price is not as much critical as the product volumes that are sold through counterfeit channels. Innovative anti-counterfeiting and anti-fraud solutions enable to detect these suspects and high-volume counterfeiters and help shut them down. Anti-counterfeiting solutions works in the following manner:

The solutions proactively search the internet for counterfeits and applied human intelligence to ensure complete data integrity
The solution enables companies to bring down the percentage of duplicate products in the market to a great extent by identifying network and syndicates high volume counterfeits

Today most organizations are realizing the importance of online brand protection from counterfeiting, product duplication and gray market sales. Apart from counterfeit detection, anti-counterfeiting solutions also help to shut down illegal operations. It automatically sends, ceases, desist DCMA letters and provides automatic auction shutdowns. Furthermore, its network of legal partners and authorized investigators, help to streamline the enforcement process.

Wednesday, 12 December 2012

Comprehensive Anti-Counterfeiting Solutions to Protect Your Brand

The brand counterfeiting phenomena have almost become omnipresent with the advent of internet technologies. Even as companies spend millions to build global brands, the internet with its wide reach can easily put such brands at risk– resulting in not just undermining the marketing investments they have made, but also eroding the brand and its reputation and losing customer trust. It has been on the rise over the past few years and is considered as an acute concern across all industries.

However, with fraudsters growing more and more sophisticated, it’s important for businesses to clearly understand the nature of the threats that they face and also take the necessary steps to protect their brands and customers. Loss of revenue caused by counterfeiting of an enterprise’s brand and intellectual property rights is serious business. Enterprises need to be aware that their products are being counterfeited and should be proactive to get a solution and strategy to tackle the same. While some solutions merely scan the internet to detect any brand and trademark violation, most of the other brand protection solutions strives to constantly be one step ahead of the counterfeiter, by operating a series of intelligence networks and providing early warning on current trends and criminal organizations.

It becomes very difficult for legitimate manufacturers to prevent brand counterfeiting considering the sophisticated techniques that counterfeiters use. Ideally a successful anti-counterfeiting strategy needs to incorporate several quantitative methods to protect your brands against these threats. Organizations today need to resort to new brand monitoring solutions that will protect them from revenue loss, increased liability risks and brand erosion. There are several renowned service providers specializing in brand protection solutions who have also introduced efficient brand anti-counterfeiting solutions to put an end to this menace.

While every business is aware of the need to implement effective measures that produce convincing and compelling results, it is the right solution that makes all the difference.  Look for a comprehensive anti-counterfeiting solution that has the capability to identify the most egregious offenders and deliver vital results. The solution you opt for must deter all brand counterfeiting attempts by launching an aggressive campaign. They must also keep a close watch on popular online auctioning sites, use automated processes for monitoring the activities of the suspicious online sellers and provide a detailed audit trail of website listings.

By choosing an efficient brand protection solution, businesses have the opportunity to stop the fraudulent activities from affecting their image and bottom line.

Read More About: brand management

Thursday, 6 December 2012

Ways to End Gray Market Sales & Its Effect

In today’s fast evolving global economy, gray market diversion is gradually becoming an acute concern that most brands encounter. Unlike black market practices, were refurbished, counterfeit or stolen products are sold as authentic brand products, gray market activities involve unauthorized movement of commerce across multiple territories by fake distributors and channel partners.

More commonly termed as “parallel importing” or “product diversion” gray market activities can be considered as a fraudulent medium of inflating profits for participating distributors, simultaneously bringing down the brand owner’s revenue. It has been observed that gray marketers tend to capitalize on lower manufacturing expenses, surplus inventory, economic conditions, fluctuating distribution expenses and currency exchange rates by exporting products without the approval of the original brand owners.

The gray marketers undercut the prices of authentic domestic distributors by selling the products at reduced prices. This results in them attaining higher or similar profits that results from the lower procuring cost from the originating countries. Gray market product diversion can occur through multiple resellers and brokers, who look for lesser product prices round the globe. The ultimate impact of gray market sales is twofold.
  • The local distributors are compelled to compete with the price reductions those results from the gray market activities, resulting in critical conflict and supply chain demand concerns within the approved sales channels.
  • The product revenue streams for brand owners gradually become unbalanced, resulting in inflated sales metrics in certain regions, simultaneously incurring minimized revenues in other regions
However, today there are innovative solutions to combat gray market sales and the product counterfeiting that takes place in these markets. Solution providers have introduced advanced anti-counterfeiting solutions that offer brand protection and helps in counterfeit detection. It operates in the following way:
Apart from proactively searching the internet on an everyday basis for counterfeits, the solution also applies human intelligence to ensure complete data integrity
  • The solutions help companies to significantly reduce the amount of fake goods circulated in the market by recognizing the networks and syndicates high volume counterfeits
Going by its very nature, gray market practices disturbs the invisible competition present in a particular sales territory by attracting the consumers and purchasers away from the authentic channels. It also sets up a false but increased demand for products that are imported by unauthentic means and offered at discounted price. With high-end brand protection and anti-counterfeiting solutions today companies can implement enforcement efforts in the apt places and minimize the percentage of counterfeits prevalent in the market.