A brand protection programme needs strategic thinking and painful prioritising

As anyone who has spent a bit of time doing brand protection will tell you, this is an arms race with no end in sight. And the less savvy among us will have a programme which resembles the ‘whack a mole’ game.

Just like you need to have a good business plan to make a successful pitch, it helps to articulate the value of the brand protection programme (BPP) in clear business terms to the company’s stakeholders. You must clearly show that the end goal of the BPP is a measurable decline in counterfeits and a corresponding increase in sales of genuine products. You must also show that the BPP is capturing market share for real products.

Know thy enemy

But before we start to think about the business plan, let’s get to know the ‘competitors’ first. It is important to understand where and how the counterfeiters operate.

Learn their distribution channels. Know their production methods. Find out how they source for raw materials. Buy a few of their products and rip them apart to study them. Figure out their distribution channels. Look at who is buying their stuff. Check if the counterfeiters are exporting. Go online to see if they have a web presence. Finally, draw up a map of their entire business operation and see if you can spot any weak link(s) in their criminal network.

Next, do a market survey to understand the market share taken by the counterfeit versus that of the company’s genuine product. For too long, conversations surrounding the severity of the counterfeit situation faced by a company have been founded on subjective perception (usually of the salespeople who are missing their sales targets).

It is better if we have an objective and quantifiable measure which can provide a good snapshot of the market situation. The market survey result can also serve as a good starting point to measure the success (or failure) of the BPP at a later date.

Programme elements

Like any good business plan, a BPP should be fluid enough to deal with a constantly changing operating environment.

First, an investigation into the company’s operations and products is important to plug internal security lapses. This is the simplest and most cost-effective step in reducing counterfeits.

Start by visiting the company’s factories, suppliers, manufacturing partners, distribution centres, retail networks, research and development centres, customer support centres, back offices, product destruction centres and so on to get a good sense of how secured is the company. It is important to cover the entire lifecycle of the product, as a lot of genuine products which should be destroyed are leaking back into the market.

One should also work across the different functions in the company to conduct these internal audits. Rope in the legal, human resources, corporate security departments and business leaders. Enforce procedures and have appropriate repercussions attached to different levels of breaches.

Once you have worked out the defensive strategy, you can go on the offensive. But, taking the fight to the counterfeiters requires careful prioritisation of limited resources. Therefore, it would be wise to choose targets carefully and ensure internal stakeholders and enforcement partners are agreed upon the measurable deliverables before launching any enforcement activity.

If you are managing a BPP which cuts across different regions and markets, prioritisation becomes even more important. As a rough rule of thumb, it is always better to dedicate more resources to a market which is either showing the biggest growth or is the biggest revenue generator for the business.

The third key component of a good BPP is to have proper data collection and analysis. Maintaining good records of the data and metrics collected from the investigation and enforcement activities can contribute greatly in formulating strategies, identifying trends and prioritising spending. More importantly, this data will help to build a business case to ensure continued investment from internal stakeholders.

The fourth and last component of a good BPP is to have good and frequent internal and external communications about it. A lot of companies like to stick their heads in the sand and deny the existence of counterfeits. But that is just plain stupid.

You may be able to manage the traditional media to reduce the number of critical press articles, but you cannot stop everyone with a Twitter account who wants to bad-mouth the company on its apparent lack of anti-counterfeiting efforts to protect customers.

So, it is better to talk about brand protection efforts on your own terms and use the data collected to ground your arguments. The communication must extend to cover all external stakeholders ranging from lawmakers, regulators, law enforcement agencies, academics and media and, lest we forget, the company’s customers.

Internal support

My boss likes to say “if you did not report it, it did not happen”. Therefore, we must also keep in mind internal stakeholders whose support is needed for the continued funding of the BPP.