The appearance of gray market products and counterfeits in both traditional and untraditional sales channels will pose significant risks to the brand integrity and organizational profits. Supply chain integrity will serve as a means to control these threats.

1. Enterprise Risk Management: Protecting Sales Channel from Grey Market Activities
Globalization has provided organizations with a wider exposure and a broader supply chain.
Technological innovations have further added on to its ability to link to various trading partners and
customers with unlimited penetration points. Though this has given the global enterprise a larger
customer base, it has also left open limitless opportunities for counterfeits and grey market distribution.
With the increasing number of new products entering the market and more organizations going global
and becoming more tech savvy, the challenges of grey market and counterfeiting is also increasing
alarmingly. Both large and small manufacturers thus need to take proactive steps to protect their sales
channel from the grey market products.
The appearance of gray market products and counterfeits in both traditional and untraditional sales
channels will pose significant risks to the brand integrity and organizational profits. Supply chain
integrity will serve as a means to control these threats. Grey market distribution is a well-devised
program that facilitates delivery of authentic goods into established markets or new and changing global
markets and is a result of overstock, shifting markets and over production. Though traditional methods
have been successfully used to control grey market sales in well-established markets, the expanding
global economy and the ever-changing global market demands requires enterprise sales intelligence to
control the grey market distribution.
One way to alleviate unauthorized sales is by continuous monitoring of the various distribution channels
and contract manufacturers. Easier said than done, with large volume of data, such monitoring can be
challenging and time consuming. However, by tightening the value network, and analyzing with the help
of an excellent structured enterprise risk management (ERM) solution companies can analyze the risk
across the enterprise, recapture lost revenues, market share, and brand reputation.
The growth of e-commerce though beneficial to the organizations has turned out as the primary driver
of this growing grey market and counterfeit activity. Leading provider of Enterprise Risk Management
solutions offers their clientele anti-counterfeiting and channel integrity solutions to manage the
enterprise from these risks. The 24/7 SaaS based solution offers brand and IP protection, enterprise
sales intelligence, channel intelligence, market intelligence and warranty watch.
The enterprise sales intelligence part of the enterprise risk management solution provides a view of the
trending global market and also provides visibility into the grey market and counterfeiting activities, thus
providing organizations an opportunity to reduce lost revenue and margins, increase distributor loyalty
and create a potential source of new distributors. Left uncontrolled these grey markets tend to compete
with authorized markets, which will eventually destroy the product and brand integrity and even the
manufacturer.
Read also on: Counterfeit detection, online fraud protection