While online takedowns can be done at scale, it can sometimes feel like an endless loop or a game of whack-a-mole, where the products taken down from one place appear on other online channels the week after.
Offline actions — investigations, raids, seizures, and litigations — targeting the source of the infringement can completely remove pirated products from the market. But these actions are far more complex, with many moving parts that need constant monitoring and updates.
Managing these actions with general tools like spreadsheets, shared folders, and email can be frustrating, which is why brand protection teams need an intelligent brand protection management platform at their disposal.
What is a brand protection management platform?
A brand protection management platform is a software to handle all your information, activities, communication, files, and analytics in a single platform. In short, it’s a complete digital workspace for brand protection for your everyday work.
Here are five reasons why your organization should stop using spreadsheets and switch to a genuine brand protection management platform.
1. Act on brand protection issues faster
Whether your brand protection team is big or small, you are dealing with a ton of data: case details, evidence, and communication to name just a few things. You’re also under time constraints to meet due dates and deadlines. And on top of that, counterfeiters can work faster now than ever before. If your data is scattered, or stored in different places, it’s hard to stay on top of updates, edits, and new versions. There are so many variables that can lead to you missing focus on what makes an impact for your team and your brand.
With a brand protection management platform, you can store all related documents, information, and communication in the same place, instead of searching for information. You can also easily share information with your colleagues and stakeholders so that everyone is working from the same information source. When everyone is working from a single source of truth, it is much easier to move forward with cases — while saving time and minimizing costs.
2. Save time toggling between multiple applications
A recent report in the Harvard Business Review states that the average office worker toggles between applications about 1,200 times per day — and “spent just under four hours a week reorienting themselves after toggling to a new application.” Over the course of a year, this equates to about five working weeks spent simply toggling between applications and getting reoriented. In other words: the more applications your team uses, the less time they spend focused on the task at hand.
But when key features and data are consolidated into a central brand protection management platform, team productivity will be augmented and simplify the way you work. Furthermore, a single workspace will create consistency and transparency and enable further seamless automation and process improvements, while preventing problems like multiple data entries.
3. Simplify processes and save costs
A consolidated platform helps you stay organized by keeping cases, targets, products, and communication together. Your brand protection projects become more focused and streamlined and no information is lost. All your team conversations, files, tasks, and milestones live together in a single shared workspace — and can be shared with your entire team.
Furthermore, having information and documents readily available in a brand protection management platform saves time on sending documents back and forth, improving time-to-decision making — and cutting costs.
A consolidated brand protection platform makes adding data to the system easier, but more importantly, it helps you to cross reference cases, find patterns, and identify similar cases/repeat offenders. In the past, you had to do this manually. But with a digital workspace for brand protection, you can automate some of these processes and digitally enhance your sleuthing skills.
4. Improve team communication and collaboration
The brand protection team isn’t just the people at your company: it’s also the investigators, law firms, and local representatives in different countries. You are all working together to protect the brand, and the best way to work together is to make sure you’re all on the same page in terms of test purchases, raids, litigations, product identifications and so on.
By using brand protection industry standard workflow, processes and terminology, a brand protection platform can improve team collaboration efficiency and remove confusion and misunderstandings between internal and external team members. As a result, everyone involved knows the status of the projects and can collaborate and keep the activities and productivity flowing, helping you reach desired results faster.
5. Make use of the latest technology and innovations
A brand protection management platform will enable your team to receive data-driven insights, as business-critical data is stored in a single workspace. Once your team will collect and analyse data, you’re likely to find that it’s easier to reach a confident decision and act in the right direction. Data allows your team to better understand the impact that any decision will have on your business.
By moving towards a data-driven approach, your team will be able to become more proactive, the data tells a story, and your team reacts to it.
Conclusion
Make sure you keep up with the changing times by providing your brand protection professionals with the proper and most effective tools for their jobs. A brand protection management platform does not only increase productivity and efficiency but enhances employee experience and satisfaction.
DH Anticounterfeit is the maker of Origo, a tailored platform for brand protection professionals to support their everyday work in terms of collaboration & communication, case & task management, investigation & identification, budget & finance, insights & analytics. This digital workspace for brand protection is ready to streamline and automate your brand protection processes — with the highest level of safety and security including ISO 27001 and GDPR compliance.