The counterfeiting and piracy industry is booming. So much so that economic projections show that fake goods’ trade will reach $2.8 trillion in 2022. What makes matters worse is that this figure only covers two of the six forms of brand threats that necessitate brand protection.
With that being said, this boom is at the expense of genuine brands that rely on the goods they produce. The companies most vulnerable to counterfeiting and other forms of brand abuse are those that innovate or design products and those that are regarded as high value or luxury brands.
While brand abuse is rampant, you can forestall it using brand protection. This article will highlight everything you need to know about brand protection. Let’s get straight into it.
Table of Contents
Brand abuse
To understand what brand protection means, we must first focus on what it protects against or prevents. Brand protection deters any brand abuse by any malicious party. Brand abuse refers to any action that infringes upon a company’s intellectual property (IP), intending to profit from its already established reputation. This abuse is also referred to as brand exploitation, and it exists in many forms, including:
- Counterfeiting
- Copyright piracy
- Trademark squatting
- Patent theft
- Rogue websites
- Brand impersonation on social media
Counterfeiting
Counterfeiting refers to the unauthorized and unofficial imitation of genuine products. It entails creating the said products and subsequently including a brand’s trademarks such as logos, symbols, fonts, and colors. The global counterfeiting industry is projected to reach between $2.8 trillion. When economic losses and money spent on law enforcement to track and arrest counterfeiters are factored in, the projections show that the figure will stand at $4.2 trillion. This would be higher than Germany’s GDP.
Copyright piracy
Copyright piracy affects literary, artistic, and scientific works. It entails unauthorized production of copyrighted work for profit. Notably, the $2.8 trillion above includes losses through the trade of pirated materials.
Trademark squatting
Trademark squatting refers to the registration of trademarks that are basically alterations of the real trademark. This is done by either adding or omitting a letter to or from a registered trademark. Alternatively, trademark squatting also entails the foreign registration of a brand already registered in another country but whose owner is yet to do the same in the international market.
Patent theft
Patents protect innovations such as designs, chemical formulas, or prototypes by forbidding unauthorized use. Innovators register their creations as patents to show ownership. As such, patent theft involves disregarding these restrictions and subsequent use of the protected innovation for profit.
Rogue websites
Rogue websites are created with the malicious intent of duping visitors into thinking they are visiting a legitimate company’s website. These websites achieve these in different ways:
- Imitating the real website
- Claiming a domain name that has a brands trademarked name
- Creating a website whose address is a variation of the real brand’s address. In this case, the creators bank on visitors making mistakes.
Brand impersonation
Brand impersonation on social media is quite common. It entails creating a social media account that imitates an authentic brand, for instance, by using their logo as the display picture or header.
Effects of brand abuse
Brand abuse can erode companies’ reputations and values and is a ticking time bomb if it is allowed to continue. It is disadvantageous to businesses in the following ways:
- It erodes trust among previously loyal customers
- It eats into the company’s sales as it competes with the genuine products, ultimately reducing revenue and profit margins
- It adds unnecessary operational costs due to the need to allocate resources to fight the brand abuse
- It destroys a company’s reputation because the fake goods might contain unhealthy or substandard ingredients
How to overcome brand abuse
Overcoming brand abuse is the reserve of brand protection services, although you can achieve this in-house using web crawlers and web scrapers. Notably, though, these two tools are ineffective when used in isolation – they have to be used in conjunction with rotating datacenter proxies. Preferably, from a trusted proxy service that can ensure a good brand protection, such as Oxylabs, or other big players in the industry.
The web crawlers scour the internet looking for marketplaces, websites, and social media accounts that contain any IP infringement. The web scraper then kicks in and extracts the data as proof of the IP breach. Later on, this harvested data is sorted, thereby separating authorized businesses from unauthorized ones. The last step entails removing the violations.
Proxies are essential tools for brand protections as they prevent IP blocking, a common anti-scraping tool. Rotating datacenter proxies change the IP address every few minutes. Thus, at no one time will the web server be bombarded by numerous web requests from a single computer, which ordinarily leads to IP blocking. Datacenter proxies are perfect because they are cheap and have a wide network of IP addresses. The proxy service provider assigns your computer different unique identifiers from this vast network during the web scraping stage.
