With hundreds and thousands of products entering the market every day, branding becomes important to facilitate easy identification and selection.

1. Ensure Brand Management with Enterprise Risk Management Solutions
With hundreds and thousands of products entering the market every day, branding becomes
important to facilitate easy identification and selection. The American Marketing Association (AMA)
defines a brand as a "name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to
identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those
of other sellers.” For instance, when thinking about shoes, the names that mostly come to the mind
are Nike and Adidas. This is because Nike’s Swoosh logo and its “Just Do It” tagline and Adidas’ three
parallel bars logo and its “Impossible is Nothing’ tagline have become as popular as the products.
Hence, these logos and taglines instantly flash in the customer’s mind as soon as anybody mentions
sportswear and apparels. This is the power of branding.
Since branding helps to create a significant and differentiated presence in the minds of the
customers, brand management – defined as the art of creating and sustaining the brand - is very
essential to increase and maintain brand reputation as well as a strong customer base. However, with
e-commerce facilitating the growth of counterfeiting and grey markets, global brand management
has become very tough for manufacturers. This is because when inferior and cheaper counterfeits of
products flood the Internet, it impacts the perception of brands worldwide. In today’s competitive
business environment, where the purchase decisions are mostly based on brand reputation alone,
counterfeit products and grey market sales affect the brand reputation of the companies and force
customers to switch to other brands.
According to Avivah Litan, VP Distinguished Analyst in Gartner Research, ‘companies who incorporate
anti-counterfeiting solutions in their brand protection efforts are the ones who are taking proactive
action to protect their customers.’ She believes that organizations should let their customers know
that they are making an effort to keep counterfeits off the market. She is definitely right because
unless and until companies do more than their bit not only to protect their brand reputation

2. effectively but also to end this menace, no amount of persuasion would have any effect on the
customers.
Brand owners, therefore, must deploy enterprise risk management solutions to protect their brand
and reputation from counterfeiting and grey market sales. This SaaS-based software searches the
Internet 24/7 for violations; it prioritizes and analyses the violations and presents them to users in an
easy-to-use dashboard. In addition to finding counterfeits online, these solutions help to shut down
illegal operations. Thus it gives the ability to find new targets and networks that sell counterfeits,
locate large players and help simplify the enforcement process.
Read More About: gray market