Combat Gray Market Sales with Brand Management Solutions

Gray market activities have become increasingly prevalent over the past few years. The most prevailing wisdom in marketing is to make use of extreme enforcement for deterring gray marketers. However, the speed and certainty of enforcement might also depend on the violation incidence.


In the modern day competitive market, manufacturers are depending increasingly on their authorized distributors to conduct value-added functions. To secure the distributor incentives to conduct these services, the manufacturers generally implement resale restrictions through implicit agreements or explicit contracts. By circumscribing to whom the distributors might sell or resell, the restrictions limit the intra brand competition and help to retain distributor margins.


Gray market activities, i.e. the sale of original trademarked items or products through the distribution channels unapproved by the brand owner/manufacturer, poses a significant threat to the manufacturer’s that have executed resale restrictions. Owing to the free reign, gray marketers can set up free-riding concerns amidst the distributors that offer consumer service, make a selective distribution system more intensive and also harm distributors that have made certain investments in the distribution channel.


Therefore, gray market is problem prone for manufacturers as it has a negative influence on distributor relations along with the manufacturer’s brand equity that undermines the integrity of the distribution channel. Gray market is also endemic all over, though not restricted to, a wide selection of industries varying from equipment, mobiles, high-tech products, medicines, watches, perfumes and other types of consumer products.


Service providers specializing in enterprise risk management with their brand management solutions, that is a SaaS based software can help companies to retrieve loss revenues, brand equity, market share that has been lost owing to the gray market. The solution also tightens the value chain and monitors the open market for buy/sell product listings and part numbers making use of efficient search agents that can capture detailed market information from a wide range of market source types, such as:


* Franchise and large distribution websites

* Independent and gray market web sites

* Email-based forums that aggregate buy/sell listings

* Trade boards

* Auction sites

* Chat

* B2C sites

* Blogs

* B2B sites


Unlike the generic programs, advanced brand management solutions offer the data in real-time to the consumer directly through a web portal in a complete, multi-dimensional market intelligence format, from which customized dashboard, user formatted data export files and custom report views can be set up. All the information is available and used within an intuitive user interface that offers the investigators with the capacity to develop and monitor case histories, evaluate evidence and better understand associations between the suspect partners, companies and associated contacts.


Read More About: brand reputation, Anti-Counterfeiting