Imagine being a customer and searching for something online only to land on a fake site or seller with a tempting cheap or expensive knock off of the goods or service that you were looking for? As an organization, you would not want your customers to have such as impression of our goods and services.
Brand protection is the process of protecting the trademark or patent of a company against counterfeiters, pirates, and infringers. In todays world, unauthorized person tends to use different brand names to commit brand abuse and sell counterfeit goods or services to people which results to a company experiencing bad reviews from their client-based audience. This action majorly results to revenue loss.
There are a few types of brand infringement and we shall highlight a few of them
- Copyright Infringement: This is the use of a licensed material or copyrighted material without permission to the copyright holder.
- Design Infringement: It is the unlicensed use of virtual material or appearance which have commercial or industrial use. Some of the virtual features are shapes, configuration or patterns.
- Trademark Infringement: This is the prohibited use of licensed trademark or service mark on products and services. It mostly results in confusion or deception on the origin of the product or service.
- Posing as someone else on social media or the internet: Social media impersonation happens when unofficial third party creates an account and acts like authentic brands hence resulting to selling counterfeited products or services to vulnerable clients.
We shall highlight some of the measures that can be taken to increase brand protection
- Discover: Have enough evidence that shows infringement of your brand. Some of these loop holes can either be photos, videos, comments or description of an item.
- Act: Act promptly once you discover that there is brand infringement. By responding quickly to such incidences, it helps in saving a lot of company revenue.
- Detection: There are brand protection companies that offer services on detecting brand infringement be it on a rogue website or someone impersonating to be a licensed brand.
- Educate your external and internal stakeholders: Companies and organizations should educate their stakeholders on the product and services that they offer which helps them to identify legitimate product and fake products to avoid being conned.
-By Hildah Wanjiru, Finance Manager