Preventive Strategies for Brand Infringement.
Brand protection is the process through which a rights holder puts in place actions/safeguards to protect their brand from any form of infringement. This may involve illegal use of the brand name, logo, or repackaging of products with impure content among other acts which might constitute a breach of your trademark, patent, design, and other forms of Intellectual Property.
Brand owners spend a lot of capital conducting extensive research, and putting forth all standard efforts to create a reputable brand, conducting a mega launch, marketing the brand, and making the product available to customers to begin generating income. When an infringer comes up with a fake version of the original brand and presents it to consumers as a temptingly cheap knockoff, the original brand owner experiences massive financial loss and a bad reputation, among other damages to the brand and the business.
To counter brand infringement, brand owners need to come up with strategies to safeguard and retain the integrity of their brand. Some of these strategies/approaches include but are not limited to the following: –
- Registration of your intellectual property rights to secure your brand in all target regions;
- Develop technological protection tools to cover logo detection, image matching, barcode readers, and scanners to detect counterfeit products;
- Secure your patent, trademark, and copyright to restrict others from using or manufacturing your products without your express permission;
- Conducting surveillance in key markets to get to know how your brand is moving in various regions;
- Conduct internal training to educate the team in the organization – there are potential teams and departments that can possibly spot and report suspicious products e.g., the sales team, digital marketing team, and the security and enforcement department;
- Have clear organization policies on how to identify, whom to report to, and tools to use when dealing with trademark infringement;
- Conduct business intelligence both through online brand watch and geographies to find out whether your brand is being infringed, find out which products are majorly affected and in which region;
- Conducting consumer awareness is essential as once the consumer identifies a suspicious product on sale, they will reach out to the area distributors and manufacturing company to raise the concerns; and
- Have a clear enforcement strategy once the products have been confirmed by relevant stakeholders to have been infringed. The perpetrators should be prosecuted accordingly to deter any further infringements.
Effecting these strategies will help the manufacturer to come up with an effective solution to curb the menace of infringement in partnership with other stakeholders.
How can we help?
At Riskhouse international, we have a robust Intellectual Property Crime and Infringement Investigation team who are ready to provide you with Investigation services, tailored to your expectations. We conduct anti-counterfeit investigations, online trademark watch, brand reputation analysis, sample test purchases, brand market monitoring and survey, brand competition analysis, and trademark infringement investigation, and aim to provide excellent comprehensive written investigation reports to help you strengthen your brand reputation and prevent violation of Intellectual Property Rights in Commerce. We also offer solutions to enhance brand integrity.
To learn more about Intellectual Property Rights and Infringement Investigations and to catch up on our other news and alerts you can visit our blog on our website at https://riskhouse.co.ke/blog/.