How to select winning KPIs to prove your brand protection strategy works

Register for Managing IP’s upcoming webinar with Red Points on May 27

When it comes to brand protection, key performance indicators (KPIs) are important metrics to measure the progress of your online brand enforcement efforts.

They are important for lots of reasons; among them, they help a business or teams stay on track, and focus on delivering the best results depending on preferred outcomes.

Maybe the final goal is simple: to educate others about your brand. Or, you want to stop others from misrepresenting or otherwise infringing your IP. Or, perhaps you have found that when you are enforcing your rights online with your in-house team, it can be very difficult to quantify results. Whatever your reason for wanting to develop a brand protection strategy, reaching a desirable goal requires trackable and measurable KPIs.

In essence, brand protection is one important component of a company's overall IP strategy. However, what do businesses need to do on a day-to-day basis to build and measure the effectiveness of a brand protection strategy?

This is where metrics come into play. On the outside, it is easy to think that brand protection is limited to legal and law enforcement. However, by measuring and tracking brand protection efforts, businesses can really start to showcase the impact of a successful brand protection strategy on the company as a whole.

A strong brand protection strategy involves a lot more than just taking down fakes. Although it is hard to assess exactly how big a counterfeiting problem is, its overall negative effect is undeniable. Having infringers on the internet means that sales can become diverted to the ‘bad guys’ and thus, this can cause businesses to suffer a loss of revenue, reputation, and investment.

1. Number of infringement removed

2. Number of infringement detected

3. Success rate (infringement removed / infringement detected)

4. Economic impact of enforcement based on type of IP protection 

5. Non-enforceable assets detected

These KPIs will greatly vary depending on a company's overall strategy.

When you are managing or protecting your business’ brand equity, it is critical to determine your most important objectives. Is it to protect your trademark in specific jurisdictions? Is it to gather data to support offline litigation cases? Or perhaps to ensure automatic takedown of frequent infringements listings?

Each business has unique challenges and different objectives. Ultimately, you want to make the best decisions for your business – but more importantly you need to ensure that you know how to communicate your performance in the language of the C-level executives, while setting clear expectations for achievement of your goals.

As a first step, here are the top questions to ask yourself, before choosing your KPIs to assess the effectiveness of your brand protection strategy.

1. What is the most important metric we can use to measure short-term and long-term success of our brand protection strategy?

2. How might my KPIs change in the future as the business matures?

3. What metrics are most important to my C-levels?

In Managing IP’s upcoming webinar with Red Points on May 27, the expert presenters will be sharing top KPIs used by over 90 brand protection leaders. Professionals interviewed for this survey include brand protection professionals working for leading brands such as Under Armour, Fila, Asics, Sky Italia and many more.

Register now to find out more

Daniel ShapiroVice president - Brand partnerships, Red PointsE: info@redpoints.com