It’s a commonly heard phrase in the world of brand monitoring and brand protection, “It isn’t driving revenue so why pay for a service to identify unauthorized brand usage?”. The cost of misappropriated brand use can be hard to measure, but it is real. There are the highly documented cases such as the recent Dominoes Pizza video which caused a huge backlash for company and its reputation. Probably oveall consumers realized the craziness of this episode and that this type of outlandish behavior and the memory will fade away. However it did require significant time and money spent by the company to respond to the episode that should have been spent on more pressing business issues.
It is well documented that product piracy and counterfitting are a big business on the Internet. Companies lose millions of dollars to black and gray markets. These losses don’t show up in corporate financials though, but they are lost revenue that someone else obtains through the unauthorized use of their brand. The tools exist today to fight this revenue loss and can result in shutting down these pirates and deliver the revenue to its rightful home. But to be effective companies need to employ the tools.
I was talking recently with a customer of ours who related the story of one of his customers. It seems that his customer had authorized him to perform some work and identify where their brand was being misused online. The results showed that there were black market sites up and running that were taking over $2M in revenue through the sale of pirated and counterfeit goods carrying the customer’s brand. This $2M in revneue could be redirected to the brand owner through a program that would cost them about $100K. Seems like a small investment for a sizable return. The executive could not get the program funded however due to tight budgets. How tight of a budget do you have when you can’t spend to increase company revenue with such a small investment. This is just one of many storied I hear repeatedly when talking with my customers.
Sure times are hard and business owners need to make certain their money is being spent wisely. Protecting your brand and defending your product against pirates is always a wise decision.
