đź“Ś Get the latest strategies to protect your revenue in your inbox

Why brand protection is important for growth
Ecommerce
5 mins

Why brand protection is important for growth

Table of Contents:

    When you employ a brand protection platform, you aren’t just protecting your business from these negative consequences. You’re also enabling it to grow faster and stronger. Here’s why.  

    Summary

    • Automating brand protection frees up valuable time for inventors, designers and businesspeople of all types.
    • Protecting a brand online leads to improved sales by removing the cheap counterfeits taking away business.
    • With low-quality imitations removed from the marketplace, authentic products will be seen as more reliable and higher quality. 
    • The rewards of creative work aren’t stolen by others. 
    • Distributors, retailers and other partners will be much more inclined to engage in partnerships, as your improved reputation and awareness will make your brand that much more attractive.

    In the beginning, finding a counterfeit might be exciting. You might think that you’ve “made it” as a company when other people start copying your products.  

    However, the situation can turn from amusing to alarming very fast. Suddenly, you have customers that didn’t realize they got a fake, blaming you for poor workmanship. As if that wasn’t enough, the impostor products poison your revenue stream and can cost even more in legal fees to track and remove.

    You’ll save more time

    It’s almost like counterfeiters can smell success from oceans away. They don’t do any R&D. They wait for you to create a popular product and then they steal it. To them, it’s simple. Once one copycat catches on, your design spreads like wildfire in the counterfeit world. 

    You can try to fight them all yourself, but that will take time. How many counterfeit sellers can you stop on your own time? How many can you stop with a dedicated in-house person? Staying on top of each counterfeiter is more than a full-time job. Pursuing legal action with sellers and manufacturers in other countries takes a lot of time, and you have better things to do. 

    With a brand protection strategy in place, you can use your time to grow the business. You could be designing the next generation of your flagship product instead of trying to keep counterfeiters away from the current one. 

    You can spend your time on core tasks while an automated platform scans the market for fakes. With more of your time freed up, you might be able to hit Q3 objectives in Q2, instead of the other way around. In short, good brand protection allows you to grow your business with the time you save. 

    New call-to-action

    You’ll see improved sales

    In addition to time, cash flow is also very valuable for an organization. However, counterfeiters can slow that river to a trickle. This happens through the impact of fake products on your market. If there are counterfeiters claiming to have your product for sale at half the price, then it’s inevitable that a substantial number of your customers will choose the fake – whether they know it’s fake or not.

    For example, let’s say you sold 1000 items in a period. In the same period, counterfeiters sold 200. So there are now 1200 people who think they have your product.  Chances are, a significant number of those 200 people would buy the real thing if the counterfeit wasn’t available to them. That means you could have many more sales in this situation. Wouldn’t that be great? Your business could do a lot of growing if it had these enhanced sales numbers. 

    “There are many factors that influence sales, but it’s clear that since we implemented Red Points a year ago, the online sales of the Microwave Cooker have increased by 20%, and in the case of the Cheese Maker, by 40%. This is objective data.”

    MercĂ© Farrerons,  International Marketing, Communications, and E-Commerce Sales Director at LĂ©kuĂ©

    You’ll maintain your reputation

    There are many unfortunate things about counterfeit items, but one of the worst is that your reputation is tied to these products. People who don’t know they’ve got a fake will blame you for anything that goes wrong with it. From poor customer service to broken pieces, it all comes down to your brand. 

    That’s another reason why a brand protection platform is important for your business’s growth. How can you maintain the growth rate you want if your reputation is at a disadvantage? You’ll spend more time smoothing out the damage from bad reviews than making new connections with customers. Heaven forbid someone makes a viral unboxing video of a fake product. 

    With a comprehensive solution in place, your reputation won’t suffer at the hands of others. You can build your customers’ trust over the long term, in each stage of your business. 

    Also, social presence is so important for many brands today. Without fakes causing a negative perception, you can keep your movement on social media going strong. 

    You can reap the reward of your creativity

    You know the hours, months, and years that go into creating a new product. It’s not easy. Many designers and founders put their blood, sweat, and tears into creating something new. 

    However, it seems like your life’s work can be taken in an instant. Suddenly, you might see your proprietary design on the shelves of a retailer that you know you didn’t sign a deal with. 

    That’s why protecting your brand is also about protecting your creative investment. Your company has put the work in to build the product, and it should be able to reap the rewards. 

    Without spending time or money on legal battles, you can stay ahead of the trend. What’s next for your product? A new generation? A different and complementary item? An automated platform lets you keep the wheels of creative design rolling ahead into the future. 

    “This was like a kick in the guts. It was like someone invaded and ransacked my home, and taken things that belonged to me.”

    David Trubridge, CEO at David Trubridge Ltd

    Other businesses will be more inclined to work with you

    Your brand doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Businesses are connected like branches on a tree. There are always other companies or people that you depend on. 

    Unfortunately, fakes can cause branches on that tree to wither and die. In a more literal sense, the partnerships you have in your distribution chain can sour because of counterfeit products.

    You can avoid this by using a brand protection solution. With one in place, fake items won’t undercut the price agreements you have with your retailers. In turn, you’ll keep the trust you’ve built with them. 

    Also, you won’t have to worry about fakes sellers popping up in markets that are exclusively covered by one of your partners. That’s good because that would be a sticky situation. 

    It takes time to forge business relationships and it’s important to protect them. With a good track record on your side, your brand can hold onto the relationships it has and can grow new ones. 

    What’s next

    On many levels, it’s easy to see why brand protection is important for growing a company. It repositions you from cleaning up the mess that counterfeiters make to working on your objectives. It saves you time that you can use to expand your business. Also, it’s a cost-effective way of dealing with fakes, so you don’t have to tie up cash in legal fees or extra payroll. 

    The constant battle against counterfeits is draining. Don’t let faceless copycats ransack your business, instead, let the power of AI go to work on your behalf. With a comprehensive solution, you can add an army of smart algorithms to your team and meet the challenge of the counterfeit market.  

    Remember, there isn’t just one counterfeit operation. There are thousands. A brand protection solution gives you eyes everywhere in the market as it detects and stops thousands of fakes. From boosting sales to saving time and money, there’s a lot that it can do to help you grow your brand.

    New call-to-action

    You may like...

    Cybercrime: Which ones are the most common threats today?
    Fake car parts driving consumers into trouble
    How to remove a counterfeit from Mercado Libre