Brand Monitoring and Brand Management to protect Brand Reputation

Brand monitoring is the practice of “strategically and regularly investigating online resources in order to discover and when necessary react to references to your companies’ trademarks and potentially the trademarks of your competitors.” Brand monitoring is very important in today’s hypercompetitive business environment where fraudsters stop at nothing to make money. Hence, brand monitoring is the only effective means to protect one’s brand name from losing its credibility in the market.

The advent of the Internet has provided fraudsters with ample opportunities to involve in counterfeiting and other illegal and fraudulent activities. This puts brands at grave risk of losing its hard-earned reputation, image, and name. Counterfeiting and gray marketing actually wipes out marketing investments that runs into millions, erodes the brand and its reputation, and breaks customer trust.

According to leading research agency Gartner, "IT needs to really help marketing and communications, legal counsel, corporate risk management and the line of business, understand how to better monitor, manage, and measure online reputation and to immediate problems faster when they occur." Hence, today Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) solution providers have come up with effective brand monitoring solutions that help to identify counterfeit suspects and gray market violators quickly for effective enforcement actions. It searches the Internet 24/7 for violations, prioritizes and analyzes the violations and presents the details in an easy-to-use dashboard. The following are some of the benefits of deploying brand monitoring solutions.

• Automated monitoring of Internet activity through intelligent search agents
• Retrieval of information down to the product and individual listing level (based upon client specifications)
• Application of both technology-based and human analysis to insure data integrity
• Protection of revenue by identifying and shutting down sites selling gray market, pirated or counterfeited good
• Reduction of false warranty/guarantees and customer support claims
• Finds new targets and networks that sell counterfeits
• Locates large players

With e-commerce facilitating the growth of counterfeiting and gray markets, global brand reputation management has become even tougher for manufacturers. Maintaining a strong brand worldwide is the key to increasing and maintaining a strong customer base. Hence, enterprises need to deploy brand monitoring and brand management solutions to combat any kind of reputation erosion.

International brand management solutions

Companies are struggling to answer the question of ‘how to protect their intellectual property in a rogue world—particularly when outsourcing to low cost regions?’ The New Momentum solution for brand management gives you the ability to:

• Find new targets and networks that sell counterfeits

• Locate large players

• Better model to find consistent trends

Get the New Momentum MAP Monitor solution which will help defend your brand from channel violations. It is a superior automated solution which will monitor online pricing and deliver prioritized, actionable data regarding violations to your Inbox.

Read More About: Anti-Counterfeiting

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

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.