Brand protection is about more than anti-fraud or theft control; it is a philosophy that should apply to your company, your brand, your reputation, your products, and the experience of your customers. We like to think of brand protection as a holistic concept, as it offers end-to-end protection across the full lifecycle of your product, as well as across your customers’ journey.
From the outset of establishing Intellectual Property (IP) and obtaining patent protection, to ensuring product packaging integrity, marketplace enforcement, and extending support to the aftermarket and end-of-life phases, brand protection plays a pivotal role. brand protection is critical to securing the reputation of your business, the quality of your products, and the safety of your customers. There are many different elements to brand protection, and good brand protection can be achieved through strong marketing and consumer engagement. However, enforcement goes a step further in helping to combat risks and brand abuse.
Why does enforcement matter in brand protection?
Brand protection works best as an end-to-end process, rather than isolated or reactionary tasks, and the key to achieving this process includes enforcement. An enforcement-driven approach allows for continuous monitoring and proactive measures to be taken. It helps to mitigate the need for expensive legal battles whilst also limiting the damage that could be done to your business, brand, or customers.
Enforcement can also be an impactful tactic for future-proofing your business against risks, by putting processes in place that help to gather intelligence for long-term surveillance and prevention. By taking this approach, you can help prevent third parties from taking advantage of your IP and brand more efficiently, thereby limiting loss of revenue and, most importantly, mitigating the damage done to your brand’s equity, reputation, and trust.
How can you build a successful brand protection enforcement strategy?
It is important that you build a brand protection enforcement strategy that is robust, intelligence-led, and tailored to your business. There are a few crucial elements that should be considered when building your strategy to make it as strong as possible.
Below, you’ll find our top 5 tips for building a successful brand protection enforcement strategy.
1. Be open and share intelligence across brands
Sharing and using intelligence is a key part of brand protection and enforcement. Many businesses actively gather intelligence on third party organisations or individuals who are abusing their brand or products, and in many cases these third parties will be abusing multiple brands within a single industry.
If your brand sits within an industry that is susceptible to counterfeiting, reselling, fraud, or theft, then openly sharing intelligence amongst competitors is a highly effective way to enforce protection at an industry-wide level. This can be achieved via an industry body or via a designated trusted and professional 3rd party enforcement partner.
By investigating and sharing intelligence relating to threats, such as names, companies, and distribution routes, businesses can take a stronger stance against third parties targeting multiple brands within an industry. This includes fostering industry communities of open communication, in which brand protection threats are not viewed as failures or weaknesses, but as industry-wide problems that can be proactively addressed together.
2. Focus on disruption as your enforcement goal
Disruption is a powerful tactic in the enforcement process. Two of the main advantages of focusing on disruption as part of your brand protection enforcement strategy are that it is non-legal, meaning you don’t have to involve lawyers and legal teams, and it is therefore a cheaper solution and often quicker way to achieve results and impact.
At its core, disruption is about stopping activity rather than prosecuting individuals, which works as an effective long-term solution for brand protection. By using enforcement intelligence to your advantage, you can shut down supply routes. This will disrupt the activities of bad actors, forcing them to rethink their approach to your brand and products. It is often the case that once illicit traders are aware that a brand is monitoring their activity, they look to move onto an easier more unsuspecting target.
The reason disruption is so effective long-term, with the even the most resilient bad actors, is that it forces third parties to seek other routes of distribution and other ways to access your market. With intelligence and enforcement, you can seek out where these people are attempting to re-establish their activities and proactively put further disruptions in place. This develops a process for continuous intelligence-led disruption that will make it extremely difficult for third parties to access your market, whilst avoiding expensive, lengthy, and public legal battles.
3. Don’t let data mask the true impact of enforcement
Enforcement is all about continued monitoring and action, but crucially it’s about driving lasting results. Data is a powerful tool in the fight against illicit trade when it is used to drive meaningful action
For example, when using a program to remove unauthorised sellers from online platforms, you may see data such as ‘700 accounts removed this month, and 690 accounts removed last month’. The reality of this, however, is that it’s highly unlikely you’ve removed 1,390 individual unauthorized sellers and have instead been disrupting the same 400 sellers who use multiple accounts or rejoin platforms after a number of suspension days. While as we mentioned earlier the element of disruption is powerful, the data can distort how meaningful the action really is.
Often, raw data lacks the context you may need to fully understand third party activities or the impact you are having on them. This is why we recommend homing in on more contextual intelligence and trends which the data provides for a high-impact brand protection enforcement strategy.
4. Treat all intelligence from enforcement as an opportunity
Businesses rightly perceive illicit brand behavior as a threat. However, brands that view brand protection intelligence as an opportunity to positively influence perception can gain a significant competitive advantage.
There are multiple ways businesses can gather intelligence about their products and customers’ experiences. Enforcement intelligence does not just have to come from purposeful surveillance, but can also be gathered through first party sources such as customer feedback.
This type of intelligence presents opportunities on two levels. On the one hand, if you receive negative customer feedback relating to a product being faulty, for example, then this could help in identifying new counterfeiting activities. For this reason, your customer support team should always check where customers have purchased their products, and request evidence of purchase to help bolster your enforcement actions.
On the other hand, this customer-facing enforcement intelligence can be treated as an opportunity for building customer trust and instilling positive brand sentiment. By being active in supporting customers who have fallen victim to third party sellers and counterfeiters, you can attempt to not only disrupt the people who supplied the product to them, but also rebuild trust and loyalty with that customer. These support activities may include providing them with a legitimate product replacement, and being forthcoming in using their statement to disrupt the same thing happening to others in the future. These actions will all communicate to your customers that your brand is responsible, accountable, and taking actions to protect them.
5. Implement robust solutions with unique markers
Whilst disruption should be your core tactic behind enforcement, it can be strategically beneficial to prosecute long-term or large-scale third parties who are making or selling non-genuine products in your market. By implementing robust traceability solutions with unique markers, you can ensure your brand meets the criteria for swift legal prosecution when needed.
This approach combines enforcement, intelligence, and disruption to establish a fully holistic approach to brand protection. Typically, brands will use a method of serialisation on their products, adopting a system in which every genuine product has a unique reference or marker that is accounted for in a centralised database.
Random and unique alphanumeric codes, provide a robust mechanism to identify each product, with a 6-7 digit code providing in excess of 70 billion combinations, which can be used if required, as evidence in court proceeding to authenticate genuine products.
This serialisation will support your intelligence by allowing you to track genuine products at multiple stages of their lifecycle journey, and the database will act as an enforceable piece of evidence that courts will recognise. By being able to proactively and efficiently prove to courts that the products in question are not genuine, by evidencing that they have no unique identifier that aligns with your database, the third parties being prosecuted will have no defence for acting outside your brand’s sphere of control.
Building your brand protection enforcement strategy
If your business is in need of a brand protection enforcement strategy, then De La Rue are here to support you. We have decades of experience in building end-to-end brand authentication and protection solutions for our clients, and we are now partnering with C3i to enhance our brand protection with packaged efficient and effective enforcement services.
To book a joint consultation with De La Rue and C3i today, click the below:
