Avoid Profit and Brand Erosion Caused By Grey Market Sales

Gray market sales are not only a hindrance in emerging markets, but a global problem that needs a global solution. Gray market goods usually include products with legitimate trademarks that are intended for sale outside a country but their sales usually occur when the price of an item is significantly higher in one country than another. In a nutshell, entrepreneurs buy the product from the country where it is available cheaply, at retail or sometimes at wholesale prices, import it legally to the target market, and sell it at a profitable price but below the normal market price. But enterprises need to keep in mind that while the estimates of gray goods vary by industry, the value is substantial.

Understanding what the gray market actually means

 

The sale of gray market products is not covered under the original manufacturer’s warranty and impacts the customers who assume that the product they bought carries the original warranty. As products find their way into the gray market through unauthorized channel, they sell these products   at a higher discount,  affecting the enterprises’ revenues and legitimate channels as well. Unlike the black market, gray market goods are not illegal; instead, they are sold outside of normal distribution channels. Besides representing the products as legitimate, the entire gray market sales process takes sales away from new products, and affects the distributor loyalty.

Why is it usually difficult to detect the offenders?

E-commerce is said to be the primary driver of this ever- growing gray market activity. While some Internet sites blatantly advertise different gray goods, most gray marketers are careful and hide this fact.  With the lack of coordination between countries, weak laws in some regions, law enforcement agencies’ are unable to detect and prosecute grey marketer.

Effective Solutions are the need of the hour

 

In today’s competitive environment, companies need to be aware of counterfeiting, gray market, trademark infringement and much more in order to stay afloat. They need to deploy brand protection software that can protect their brand and trademark from exploitation.

Today companies specializing in online brand protection solutions have come up with SaaS based software solutions that help you to combat gray market sales. These solutions-providers offer cost-effective brand protection solutions that use advanced search technology to monitor activity for any number of products globally. It picks up pricing, discount percentages, and quantities for each product and helps to quickly identify the companies that cause loss of revenue, brand, and customer satisfaction. Invest in the right solution to proactively recapture lost revenues, market share, and brand reputation by tightening your distribution channel.

 

Read More About: Enterprise Risk Management, Brand Management

 

 

Educate Your Employees About Phishing Awareness

Most of the times the data attacks and Phishing attacks happen you are unaware. That is to say when you are browsing the internet for some information or checking your mails and come across unknown links, URL address and pop ups that look authentic at the first glance but invariably lead to your fraudulent websites selling faulty goods or the ones that asks you to share your private data like bank account details, mobile number, email id and many more.


This is the way in which most Phishing attacks operate. Phishing is an after effect of social engineering where the Phishers and hackers aim to steal all the personal details of an organization and cause losses like data theft, tarnishing of brand reputation, loss of market share and revenue. There are times when a single Phishing attack has caused the entire computing network to fail and loss causes could not be retrieved despite implementing anti-virus and anti-spyware protection and other security firewalls. The modern day hackers are smart and have come up with complicated and sophisticated Phishing attacks that look like genuine mails and URL links. Therefore, it is essential that companies resort to efficient measures in implementing Phishing protection programs so that they can avert the losses and other difficulties.


More than anything else social engineers and Phishers work on an individual or employee’s ignorance and unpreparedness about Phishing attacks. Most people do not know the way Phishing mails are especially created to target global brands and enterprises. Hence, it is essential to have Phishing awareness programs where a company takes the time to make it clear to their employees the ways and means by which a Phishing attack is carefully planted. Mails such as winning a huge lottery amount or a lucrative career opportunity based on a “lucky draw” on e-mail id’s play on the individual’s sentiment and trick them to submit their private data.


However, service providers today have introduced high-end anti-Phishing software that offers detailed statistics on the employee response and behavior on Phishing attacks, security awareness and also recognizes the scopes for potential data leakage and evaluates the data loss prevention. Few other important features are:


* Helps enterprises in estimating the probable threats associated with Phishing

* Offers flexible reporting capacities and incorporate them back into the enterprises’ main performance-indicator framework

* Offers a “road map" solution highlighting on Phishing awareness and training within the organization

* Recognizes weakness within people, process and technology links

* Helps in prioritizing remediation attempts via effective benchmarking and maturity evaluation


This apart, the software assesses the incident response program and a sends a customized test to the employees informing them about their actions. Furthermore, there is an e-learning module that helps to educate employees about Phishing protection.


Read More About: Simulated Phishing Attack, Protection From Phishing, Anti Phishing Software

Measure your Online Effectiveness in Facebook?

Interacting online and online conversations have become an essential aspect of social networking and monitoring. Previously, the same used to be tagged as “idle chatting”. However, with the advent of the social web and social media interactions it has become very important for almost every brand established or a start-up venture to stay online and contribute meaningfully to social networking.

 

It is important to note in this regard, staying online does not necessarily mean posting random news updates or information for the sake of staying online. It is essential to estimate how efficient and effective is your online marketing, branding and PR initiatives are. It is equally important to have a clear knowledge on how much traffic your website generates from social networking websites, for instance Facebook or Twitter. These vital inputs, often termed as social intelligence helps you to ascertain whether your social media marketing initiatives are working or not.


Social media analytics tools are the apt medium that helps us have a clear understanding about the website traffic and how much it is generated through online networking. Facebook today has its own advanced analytics that concentrates on the shared content and user demographics. Users can download data regarding regular visits and the percentage of likes and comments. It is essential to have it in mind that the data emphasizes completely on the Facebook page and has no link to the homepage.


However, if Facebook is your social networking website then you must leverage the Facebook analytics that several service providers offer today. This is an effective medium that helps is estimating quickly the success of the Facebook campaigns making use of a mix of analytical smarts along with a Facebook analytics solution that provides fast results for business to keep a track of the web data, getting engagement metrics and real-time distribution. It also has the capacity to attain instant feedback and helps the consumers to optimize their campaigns, products, features, interactions and contents faster.


Apart from this, the solution also has a simple virtualization interface that provides both drill down capacities and trending views providing intuitive insights to come in quicker, smarter business decisions even amidst a huge selection of data. Furthermore, it also helps the end user to gain insights into the key impacts on the K-facto, viral campaigns and understand as to what keeps a certain section of the audience engaged can impact the revenue generation.

Identify and Predict Consumer Behavior with Social Media Analytics Tools

Today enterprises have a tough time in making an impact upon the customers. This is because today’s customers buy products if and only if the products appeal to their preferences. There was a time in the past when enterprises had the last word, but today things are different. Thanks to social networking, customers today have the first and the last word on anything and everything let alone products. With people sharing their likes, dislikes preferences, opinions, perceptions, suggestions, and comments online, enterprises have to be careful when marketing their products. Hence, what enterprises need is social media analytics tools to identify, predict, and respond to consumer behavior.


Here is a look at the benefits of a best of breed social analytics tool:


* Analyze data in real-time from across social, mobile and web platforms to allow game developers and social commerce companies to continuously improve customer acquisition, engagement and social game monetization campaigns.

* Modernize your ability to capture broad data, uncover meaningful insights, and close the loop with automated action – all in near real-time.

* Track user behaviors in real-time and get immediate feedback on what is working vs. what isn’t so you can optimize on the fly.

* Use visualization interface that helps you truly understand business performance to make faster, smarter operating decisions.

* Real time data and actionable insights to help you reach faster, smarter operating decisions.

* Provides results in seconds for businesses to track user behaviors in real-time and get immediate feedback on what’s working and what isn’t so you can optimize products, features, campaigns, and interactions on the fly.

* The easy-to-use visualization interface provides both trending views and drill-down capabilities

* Faster insights into the key influences on your K-Factor and virality campaigns, understand what keeps customers engaged, and uncover the levers that can most affect revenues.

* Easy to get up and running.

* Measure the effectiveness of acquisition campaigns and conduct funnel analysis on viral features and promotions

* Monitor virtual currency monetization and trend metrics like ARPU, ARPPU, conversions, payment type, etc

* Get actionable insights into their most-used app features and what drives monetization to make faster, smarter operating decisions.

* Create user profiles to target and customize app content to the most-engaged (and most valuable) users, such as frequent visitors or frequent purchasers

* Get deeper insights into the demographics of users with information provided through Facebook’s Social Graph API

* Provides trending views and drill-down capabilities

* Insights to make faster, smarter operating decisions across huge amounts of social data.

* Acquisition to revenue.

* Get faster insights into the key influences on your K-Factor and viral campaigns

* Understand what keeps customers engaged, and uncover the levers that can most affect revenues.


Thus, good social media analytics tools help to modernize analytics by going beyond simple metrics and measurements, and thereby allowing enterprises to focus on a broad array of data and mine the vast treasure trove of social media to understand which events, content and user segments drive the most revenue.

Benefits of Supply Chain Solutions

The modern day business today is a global platform that compels organizations, irrespective of its location or primary market base, to consider the world in their competitive strategy analysis. The firms cannot ignore external aspects such as competitive situations, economic trends and technology innovation in other places. Today most organizations are truly becoming global with their supply chain management strategy and are changing their ways in which they used to monitor their operations and logistics practices. Modifications in trade and modernization of transport infrastructures and the competition intensification have upgraded the significance of flow management to new levels.

 

Supply chain solutions can be described as a set of three or more organizations associated directly with one or more than one of the upstream and downstream flow of goods, services, data and finances from the source to the consumer. It comprises of all the levels involved, indirectly or directly, in catering to a consumer’s demand, it not only comprises the suppliers and manufacturers, but also the warehouses, transporters, retailers and the consumers themselves. Within an enterprise the supply chain comprises of every function included in catering to consumer demand. These functions include components such as:

 

  • New product development
  • Marketing
  • Operations
  • Distribution
  • Finance
  • Customer service

 

Therefore, it is essential to partner with a supply chain consulting firm so that you can leverage its experience and expertise. Companies specializing in supply chain solutions help you to minimize your operational expenses, enhance the speed, elasticity and bring down the level of risks.

 

If you have assessed your company’s supply chain and evaluating its weaknesses, strengths and want to see the scopes of possible solutions and improvements then its best to invest in a supply chain solution. Today service providers of reverse logistics have come with up advanced supply chain solutions with a supply chain consulting team that helps companies to reshape and restructure their operations in order to increase speed, efficiency and the flexibility. Some of these service providers specialize in last-mile interventions that help in adjusting over-offshore supply chains. Owing to the fact that every business has its own unique need and demands, the supply chain consulting team has the expertise to customize the systems that is provided rather than taking on a “cookie clutter” approach.

 

Service providers of supply chain solutions work by understanding the business requirements first and provide solutions that are practical and attainable. The service providers will straight away not suggest you to re-establish your operation but rather suggest the much needed solutions.

 
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