In a recent interview with SafetyDetectives, the globaleyez GmbH Managing Director, Oliver Guimaraes, discussed the company’s evolution from 2007 and highlighted their 360° brand protection approach. Emphasizing the financial and reputational risks of neglecting brand protection, Guimaraes urged businesses to stay ahead in the dynamic digital landscape using technology and data analytics. The interview concludes with practical advice for businesses seeking to fortify their brand protection strategies, making it a valuable guide in the ever-evolving online commerce landscape.
Hi Oliver, Can you share the story behind the founding of globaleyez GmbH and what inspired you to start a brand protection company?
Actually, when founding the company in 2007, the purpose was to help a client within a former digital consultancy business to set up a grey market monitoring solution. As this worked out nicely, more requests came in that included brand protection assignments (which at that time might have had a different name, still). Looking back more than 15 years, I can say that we’ve been in business for a long time which as well creates a significant expertise, gained from experience.
Can you walk us through the key services that globaleyez provides to help businesses protect their brands and intellectual property?
With our broad portfolio of services, we pursue a 360° brand protection approach for our clients. The basis of good brand protection is a thorough understanding of intellectual property in all its facets next to a profound knowledge of tech infrastructure and a hands-on approach to deliver results within a broad framework of IP, platforms, infrastructure providers and much more. To this end, we have set up a wide range of monitoring services, including the monitoring of marketplaces and social networks using keyword and image searches, domain monitoring, image monitoring across the entire Internet and app monitoring.
Our test purchases provide brands with deeper insights and relevant evidence on the sellers and products of IP-infringing offers uncovered by our monitoring services. We carefully document this information upon request.
In addition, marketplace sales tracking offers in-depth analyses of sellers, their sales and product prices on online marketplaces. Based on this data, our clients have the opportunity to identify trends, set priorities at an early stage and initiate economically sensible, targeted measures against infringements.
In the final step, we offer targeted takedowns on online marketplaces, social networks, app stores and websites, as well as domain takedowns or blocking. Over the years, we have built up a large portfolio of partnerships with marketplaces, payment providers, registrars and registries, authorities and more so we can act quickly and effectively.
In addition to our established services, we also offer tried and tested brand protection software tools for your own use. Most notably screenseal, a Google Chrome Extension developed by us that allows you to take screenshots with a court-approved digital timestamp.
In your opinion, why is brand protection crucial for businesses, both large and small?
Because brand infringement is costly – and can do serious harm to the brand, its distribution and its customers.
Fraudulent users always find new ways to infringe on your copyrights, patents and trademarks, causing your brand immense losses of revenue, reputation and trust. Online brand protection ensures that these infringements are quickly detected and removed from the internet to minimise the losses of businesses and allow brands to grow.
Effective and comprehensive brand protection also has numerous positive side effects for a brand. For example, the data collected from marketplace and social media monitoring provides a good insight into markets that companies have not yet tapped into, thereby lowering barriers to market entry for brands and their products.
Online brand protection requires companies to keep up with the latest trends in e-Commerce and the internet in general. These include the developments of marketplaces and shopsystem providers, the progress of the metaverse or new phenomena in the area of Web
3.0 domains. This allows them to keep their finger on the pulse of the times, deal with possible new sales and advertising channels before their competitors and at the same time create a secure environment for their customers.
How does globaleyez leverage technology and data analytics in its brand protection solutions?
We offer a variety of software-based solutions to optimise our work processes and provide our clients with a smooth and fast service. Where we can, we automate our workflow to reduce errors and be more efficient. Our brand protection experts are highly trained in cyber security and use project management software so that everyone involved has a complete overview of developments.
Our brand protection software tools are designed for optimal cooperation with our clients and we attach great importance to the fact that clients can contact us quickly and easily to initiate instructions for action directly from our monitoring tools. This guarantees smooth communication and leads to IP infringements being removed from the Internet without any detours.
On request, we also provide our clients with real-time data views and analyses of the data collected for all our services.
What are the potential risks and consequences for businesses that neglect or underestimate the importance of brand protection?
Businesses that neglect or underestimate the importance of brand protection risk losing their impact on how they are perceived by consumers both online and offline. On the one hand, this has a direct impact on sales figures, as companies automatically lose sales to IP infringements that they allow to persist and on the other hand, this has an impact on their reputation, their brand development and future earnings.
Just like in a physical store, online product presentation corresponds to a brand’s reputation and has a significant impact on its revenue. On marketplaces and in social media offers of counterfeits, cheap lookalikes, grey market products and many others can appear beside brands’ genuine offers, devaluing their products and tarnishing their reputation
To illustrate the impact of IP infringements on a company’s revenue, let us present the following table, which we summed up for a client’s project:
copyright by globaleyez GmbH
The graphic shows price changes after enforcement by globaleyez and after further legal measures. For the product categories pullover, smartphone covers and sunglasses we conducted takedown action in conjunction with legal cases which lead to significantly increased product prices on the market, ergo, more authorized sales. At the time of the sample survey for the jackets category, there were still 14 pending legal cases and we conducted no takedown action which caused a decrease of product prices – which demonstrates the effects. .
Consumers who have had a bad experience with a brand or a company’s products because they have fallen for counterfeits (which, by the way, are becoming increasingly professional and difficult to detect), lookalikes, phishing or other scams will always associate these bad experiences with the original brand, which can mean that these consumers will no longer be customers.
What advice do you have for businesses looking to establish or enhance their brand protection strategies?
First, identify the focus of your brand protection issues. This will help you to better scale your brand protection measures and tailor them to your needs.
Also, focus on the sellers and products that have a significant impact on marketplaces and thus prioritise them top-down in your online brand protection. This allows you to take targeted and economically efficient action against trademark infringements and reputational damage.
Be varied and open to new measures and strategies. Fraudsters are creative and are constantly finding new ways to bring IP infringing products to market. Be one step ahead of them, be even more creative and act quickly and early. This will save you a lot of effort in the fight against IP infringements.