2 min read
Last month, Easy Prey, a weekly podcast featuring stories about scams, schemes, and situations for listeners who wish to avoid becoming an “easy prey,” invited IPSecure’s CEO and founder, David Cooper, to a discussion about online brand protection. Here are some of David Cooper’s top insights from the April 27, 2022, broadcast:
“In the United States, brand owners have the legal responsibility to protect their intellectual property, and that means stopping counterfeiting when possible.”
Brand owners need to invest in tools, solutions, and strategies that enable them to police their products on ever-expanding e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. On Amazon, bad actors “hide in plain sight, " making it easy for buyers to be deceived. Brand owners have a duty to protect their IP and also lower the risk of potential harm to consumers.
“To not think about brand protection through a business lens is missing an opportunity.”
Brand protection is a growth driver, not just a cost of doing business. Good brand protection systems give users not only the tools to police their products and conduct infringement enforcement actions, but also allow brand owners to manage their authorized third-party sellers and resellers. Effective brand protection means bringing sales, legal, and marketing together in a coordinated effort to reduce risk and boost sales.
“There needs to be intelligence behind the actions we are taking against unauthorized sellers. We can’t remove 100 sellers and then have 100 new sellers show up. We created a business to stop that stalemate and give people a better way to measure success [against counterfeiting].”
The IPSecure platform is a software as a service designed with a regular business user in mind – it’s simple and easy to use, unlike more complicated legal SaaS systems. Companies don’t need to hire a lawyer to send a “cease and desist” letter. IPSecure removes all the complexity from legal enforcement operations.
“Whether you like it or not, your products are being sold on Amazon. You need to police your products to avoid the risks to consumers and to your business. Amazon is ½ half of every dollar spent online so if you are not monitoring your products actively, I question the business you are in.”
Many brand owners, who deliberately choose not to sell on Amazon, mistakenly believe this will alleviate any counterfeit problem. This is false. As IPSecure shared in a recent blog post titled, “Like it or Not, All Brands Sell on Amazon,” a company's refusal to sell on Amazon does not mean dozens of unauthorized sellers aren’t and won’t which means brand owners have to monitor the marketplace. Using Amazon’s own anti-counterfeit resources along with other effective solutions make for the most effective brand protection program. As Cooper explained, “[IPSecure] coexists quite nicely with Amazon’s own brand protection tools.”
“Other brand protection companies are trying to be everything to everyone. Almost everything they do is manual, and services based. That means the costs are high. We are the ‘Slack’ of brand protection.”
For more information, or to start protecting your brand on Amazon in minutes, visit ipsecure.com and sign up today!
