|
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
Related Articles -
Counterfeiting, brand reputation, anti-counterfeiting, Enterprise Risk Management, Gray Market,
| 
