In addition to online marketplaces, social media pages and rogue influencer videos pose a serious problem of tricking consumers into purchasing counterfeit products, making monitoring your brand online and offline essential.
Driving Changes in How Customers Engage with Brands
The way customers interact with brands has been changing over time with two factors driving that change. One is technology where you have omnichannel sales and get messages from social media feeds, e-commerce, marketplaces, influencers and so on. Customers buying products online also have access to delivery infrastructures that haven’t before existed in the way they do today. For example, if you buy something on Amazon in Asia or the U.S., it can reach you within hours. And what counterfeiters really take advantage of is exactly that: they find places where it’s easy for them to promote and sell anonymously and use this delivery infrastructure that’s been created by other legitimate businesses who have invested billions and billions of dollars in e-commerce.
The second thing that is helping smooth the path for piracy are payment systems that make it possible to move funds cross-border seamlessly, which are often associated with e-commerce and the rise of e-commerce and social media selling sites based in China. Over 75% of counterfeit and pirated goods seized by U.S. Customs originate from China. Brand owners all over the world frequently find their intellectual property unlawfully shown on Chinese e-commerce and social media platforms which serve as major distribution networks for counterfeit goods.
Today, with the various means of transacting, getting money from someplace in Europe into China is instant. This type of financial structure unfortunately is geared up to benefit fraudsters.
For the cosmetics industry for example from a brand perspective, it’s not only about counterfeiting, which may account for 30-40% of the issue. There are also infringers using other brand assets – films, photos, design patents, a wide spectrum of IP – to sell a particular product that could be a counterfeit, or even a lookalike product.
Finding Out Who’s Selling Fakes
Authentix Online Brand Protection has a unique strategy for discovering the online vendors responsible for dealing in counterfeit products and those dealing in legitimate goods via its proprietary online monitoring and enforcement solutions. The aim is not only to protect clients’ brand image and copyright, but also their customers and reputation.
Authentix uses machine learning-based algorithms to scale up analysis and identify hidden trends in data gathered both online and offline to identify high-value targets. We also offer specialized services in China with a dedicated online brand protection team there that conducts investigations both online (including through unique, crowdsourced WeChat and WhatsApp investigations) and offline. The process begins with data gathering, in which Authentix scrapes data for clients’ brands from approximately 500 different e-commerce marketplaces and social media platforms. This data is fed into its online platform for risk screening and risk-scored by our proprietary algorithms where over 30 parameters are considered.
Authentix currently protects over 200 brands and maintains a 94% success rate across platforms. We provide our clients in the cosmetics and beauty industry with customized online brand protection services including tracking trademark infringement and removing offers for fake products as well as offline investigations and support with legal research.
In Conclusion
If your brand has experienced increasing difficulty enforcing trademarks and protecting intellectual property on online marketplaces and social media platforms such as in China, you’re not alone. Enforcing your brand's trademarks and protecting your intellectual property online has become increasingly difficult with the rise in popularity of Chinese e-commerce sites and social media platforms. Authentix has developed a free guide with information to help ensure your brand is protected from counterfeiters, including our top recommendations for brand owners.
Click here to download the guide.
Authentix
As the authority in authentication solutions, Authentix brings enhanced visibility and traceability to today’s complex global supply chains. For over 25 years, Authentix has provided clients with physical and software-enabled solutions to detect, mitigate, and prevent counterfeiting and other illicit trading activity for currency, excise taxable goods, and branded consumer products.
