The holiday season may be a season of joy and good spirits, but for many brand owners it is also the season of counterfeits and increased enforcement activities. For this Edition’s BP Forum, we asked a few brand protection professionals what they focused on during the 2017 holiday season.
What brand protection issue did you concentrate on this past holiday season? Any surprises?
Director, IP Protection & Enforcement Americas, Dolby Laboratories
The holiday season is always exciting at Dolby. Consumer Electronics’ sales at brick and mortar as well as e-commerce retailers typically peak, including for infringing products. Like in past years, our aim was to disrupt the flow of infringing products in transit and points of sale. Our analysis shows – in line with market trends – a growth of infringing products offered on e-commerce platforms and an even wider use of shipping methods. Our biggest surprise came in the latter of these trends, with large seizure of infringing products coming via small ports through unconventional shipping methods such as rail freight transport.
Legal Counsel, Whirlpool Corporation
We continued our efforts to remove listings for counterfeit products from online marketplaces via regular monitoring and submission of complaints to the platforms. Our holiday surprise was that an unknown individual (presumably someone on the receiving end of our complaints) began submitting a large volume of fake complaints to Amazon using our contact information. Emails from upset sellers that were the targets of these fake complaints (and, in some cases, their lawyers) began rolling in shortly before Christmas. While this caused a bit of a scramble before we figured out what was happening, we were ultimately able to identify the fake complaints, inform the sellers, and report what had happened to Amazon so the complaints could be reversed.
NA Sales Director, Global Brand Protection, Duracell – A Berkshire Hathaway Company
This past holiday season Duracell’s focus was primarily on diverted products. We identified some “bad eggs” early on and made a concerted effort throughout the year to negatively impact the diverters’ inventory. That positively impacted Duracell as we reduced the amount of margin-depleted product.
Our brand protection efforts are fairly new and our team worked tirelessly to stem the flow of Duracell product into the diverter wire. We have a long way to go; however, the team and our external partners did impact sales for our authorized retailers.
THE BRAND PROTECTION PROFESSIONAL | MARCH 2018 | VOLUME 3 NUMBER 1
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