Brand Protection: Safeguarding Global Organizations the Techno-Savvy Way
Brand’ as defined by the American Marketing Association is a “Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.” It can take in any form including color combination and slogan. Though initially meant for identifying and differentiating a product, over the years this stands for performance, benefits for the product and the company.
The power of the brands to communicate across masses with an emotional impact is what most enterprises rely on. Today when brands play a bigger role in the market performance, are powerful symbols in economic debates, social issues and politics, brand protection has also become serious issue and needs to be dealt with immediately. Enterprises need to be aware of the risks associated with outsourcing their products in the global market. Most companies are not prepared to deal with the risks involved and are left exposed to product counterfeiting and unauthorized sales channels.
Counterfeiting is a criminal activity that has been slowly digging into the brand values. It not only impacts the bottom line but also affects the image of the company, its stock value and even the brand itself. It is estimated that 5-7% of all world trade is in counterfeit goods, affecting almost every industry from consumer and luxury goods to pharma, automotive and defense. Over $650 billion in global sales are lost to counterfeit goods annually. It is estimated that counterfeiting costs U.S. businesses $200 billion to $250 billion annually.
Globalization though had opened a world of opportunities; it has also paved way for growth of counterfeiting activity. In an effort to meet the greater demand for lower overhead cost and production costs, the manufacturing units have moved to developing countries with low labor costs. This was a step to ensure more production and control of production costs by a huge margin. These production locations over the years have become the epicenter of counterfeit goods and grey market distribution centers.
Manufacturers need to understand that anti-counterfeiting and brand protection now requires more techno-savvy and reliable solutions. They need to look for solutions, which are effective over the entire supply chain. An anti-counterfeiting solution with brand protection technology, which can easily find the violators and shut them down help in recovering the revenue and brand reputation lost to counterfeits.
Brand protection solutions provide global enterprises, a visibility into a vast business intelligence data, which can be used to trace and identify fraudsters and counterfeiters. Further, this would help the manufacturers take proactive steps to cut off counterfeiting before it can damage the organization’s bottom line.
Further, with Internet becoming the most sought after method of fast and quicker communication, attempts to prevent Internet fraud is also one of the thoughtful steps brand protection. By engaging solutions, which can provide clarity and visibility into B2B sites, auction web sites and online shopping stores, manufacturers can be assured of having taken a few steps towards brand protection.
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