July 2014

Kelly McCarthy writes “Strategic Budgeting for Anti-Counterfeiting Programs” for InsideCounsel

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Picture this: You are sitting in your office, minding your own business, when all of the sudden you get an e-mail that says, “Our distributor called to tell us his sales dropped this quarter. He says it’s because there is a competing business in town selling fake versions of our stuff at cheaper prices. I looked online and apparently there are companies advertising that they can make up to 20,000 pieces a day. These guys are clearly making fakes. Please take care of this, we can’t have counterfeits cutting into our sales.”

Where do you start? What do you do? Nobody wants a counterfeiting problem. Counterfeit products result in lost sales and a diversion of company resources. Modern counterfeiting goes beyond our traditional understanding of fake goods. Counterfeiters are now selling “fake likes” and “fake followers” and any other intangible asset one can imagine. It affects most companies in almost every industry, and no one is immune.