Counterfeiting – A Major Threat to the Brands

Technological innovations over the years have helped enterprises to expand globally. However,

with an objective of earning greater revenue, the enterprise change their marketing strategies,

increases their efficiency levels or works towards cutting costs. Further to withstand the

competition prevalent in the business environment, enterprises need to meet the customer

requirements too. The ever growing and ever-changing customer requirements have paved way to

the counterfeit markets.

Counterfeiting means to imitate something. Wikipedia refers to counterfeit products as “fake

replicas of the real product and describes the forgeries of currency and documents, as well as the

imitations of works of art, toys, clothing, software, pharmaceuticals, watches, electronics,

handbags and shoes”. Produced to take advantage of the superior value of the imitated product,

the counterfeit products has a fake company logos and brands and results in patent infringement

or trademark infringement.

Fueled by consumer demands, counterfeiting today has become a big business with the global

trade in illegitimate goods having increased from $5.5 billion to approximately $600 billion

annually as per the reports of International Anti counterfeiting Coalition. Other facts surfaced

from their report states that approximately 5%-7% of the world trade are in counterfeit goods and

the U.S. Enterprises suffer $9 billion in trade losses due to international copyright piracy.

Counterfeiting has turned in as one of the fastest growing economic crimes worldwide

threatening the economies of developed and developing countries while damaging new

investment and endangering public health and safety.

The technological advancements have further enabled counterfeiters to produce better copies of

products and packaging. The increased sales of counterfeit goods have a deep negative impact of

the brand reputation. Enterprises thus need to take in adequate steps towards brand protection.

One way is to bring in awareness among the consumers about counterfeit products and their

impact on the society at large. The consumers who go in for counterfeit products need to

understand that by purchasing these counterfeit goods they are risk funding nefarious activities

that contributes to unemployment, budget deficits thus compromising the future of the country

and global economy.

Understanding the fact that today's counterfeiters are well-equipped and skilled, the leading

service providers offer global enterprise anti-counterfeiting solutions that are not only intelligent

and intuitive but also one that spans across the enterprise. With a cohesive anti-counterfeiting

strategy, these enterprises can work on brand protection through

● Trademark protection with the help of in-house or contractual Intellectual Property lawyers

and confiscating of counterfeit goods

● Working with trade groups that share the same common interests can help to efficiently

protect the intellectual property

● With anti-counterfeiting solutions that include global monitoring of e- commerce along with

a provision for a back-end database that can organize the collected information into

actionable intelligence.

Such solutions that are offered as software-as-a service, provides ways and means to encounter

the counterfeiting issues with end-to-end brand protection and real-time monitoring of the

sources.

Read More About: Enterprise Risk Management, Gray Market