Intellectual Property Protection and Enforcement Manual - Ipr-policy.eu

Brand Protection Manual
motivated by greed and will move whatever products they can through their illicit chains of
distribution. Indeed, whether it is knockoff designer handbags or fake pharmaceuticals, it does not
matter to the counterfeiters—as long as there is a market for the product, they will manufacture and
sell it. Accordingly, every business is at risk.
It is estimated that intellectual property theft costs domestic companies between $200 billion and
$250 billion a year 1 in lost revenues and has resulted in the loss of 750,000 jobs in the United
States. 2 The harm caused by counterfeiting and piracy cannot be overstated. Every sale made by a
counterfeiter is a sale that a legitimate business will never make. Because the counterfeiter is unlikely
to have access to the same quality raw goods as the legitimate manufacturer and has no incentive to
institute quality control practices or procedures, the resulting counterfeit product is most assuredly
inferior in quality—and, in many instances, can be downright dangerous—compared to the
legitimate product. As a result, an introduction into the market of a single counterfeit product has the
potential to undermine and irrevocably damage years of building a business’ goodwill and reputation.
To determine whether your business has a counterfeiting problem, you should ask the following
questions:
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Do you have well-known or emerging brands
Have your brands captured a significant share of the market
Do you have a unique product that would be desired at a low price
Are you experiencing an unexplained increase in returns or consumer complaints
Are the reasons given for increased returns and complaints different than usual
Have you lost market share in a particular region or regions
If you answered “yes” to any or all of these questions, then someone, somewhere, is probably
counterfeiting your product. If you are not sure, or need to better understand the scope of your
potential problem, you should (1) analyze your returns, complaints, and market share trends for
anomalies; (2) interview key members of your sales, marketing, and quality assurance teams to obtain
their firsthand impressions of the problems; (3) perform market surveillance—or “covert buys”—in
areas that have suspicious decreases in market share or increases in customer dissatisfaction; (4) survey
the Internet for sales of your product at suspiciously low prices and from unauthorized sources; and
(5) investigate markets that you have not yet entered, because if your brand name has market share
where you are not even doing business, it is pretty clear that you have a problem.
In short, any company with a well-known, valuable brand should assume that its brand is already
being counterfeited. For companies lucky enough not to be victims, it is a question of when, not if.
Accordingly, all businesses should develop and implement anti-counterfeiting and piracy strategies
and build them into their everyday business practices. It should be made clear from the CEO level to
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