Brand protection has a measurement problem

By Chris Bailey, Head of UK & EU Enforcement at IP services business Rouse

Every function that competes for a company’s budget is expected to prove its worth. Risks like fraud and cybersecurity can be defended with a number. Brand protection, the work of tackling counterfeits and copycats, is the odd one out. The problem it addresses is real and growing, but the teams running it can rarely put a firm value on what they achieve.

Anti-counterfeiting receives only a fraction of the money that companies commit to other enterprise risks such as fraud and cybersecurity, according to a 2026 study in the Journal of Economic Criminality. It is not that the threat is any smaller; it’s that firms find it hard to quantify the damage counterfeiting does, or the value enforcement brings.

Activity is not the same as impact

Most brand owners, and many of the specialists they hire, measure activity: raids conducted, goods seized, listings taken down. The assumption is that activity equals impact, yet the two are rarely the same. Put a page of enforcement statistics in front of a finance director, and the reply will likely be: so what? On their own, the numbers reveal nothing about the scale of the problem, who really drives the trade, or which actions genuinely prevent it from continuing to happen.

Enforcement does not translate cleanly into sales either. Only when a counterfeit is priced close to the level of the genuine product does it substitute for a real sale. So companies that want to see the monetary value of brand protection are asking the wrong question. A brand is worth more than the sales it generates. It is also the trust customers place in it. And trust is hard to put a figure on. That, however, does not mean that brand protection can not prove its worth. While it cannot show a direct financial return, it can still show measurable impact and clear progress against its objectives, in the same way any other business function.

Counterfeiters may operate in the shadows, but they often target the same customers, and they can be studied in much the same way as competitors. Who are the serious players? Where do they manufacture? How do their goods reach the market? In manufacturing hubs such as China, counterfeit production tends to cluster in the same towns and districts, feeding off a shared pool of expertise. Working out how many operators sit at the top of that chain, who is driving the trade and earning the most margin, and how to disrupt them is the starting point for a strategy built around measurable objectives.

The two outcomes worth tracking

What metrics should companies be putting on their brand protection expenditure? Across all the industries we have worked with, there are two outcomes that most brand owners are trying to achieve: visibility and deterrence.

Visibility means how much interference there is between a brand and its customer because of infringing offers. In the online environment, how many rival sellers and prices does a shopper see before reaching the real product? In the offline retail setting, is a lookalike sitting on the shelf next to it? Visibility of the genuine product tends to improve through suppression, such as online takedowns and market raids. However, while it has a useful function in defending sales, focusing on visibility only is reactive and rarely reaches the source of the problem. It can feel like whack-a-mole, and should not be the only strategy.

Deterrence, meanwhile, looks at enforcement actions taken against key targets – suppliers and distributors. Fundamentally, it asks whether the infringer you act against actually stops, and whether that enforcement action has also ensnared, or frightened off, others in the supply chain. A counterfeiter who shrugs off enforcement as a cost of doing business means the brand owner has achieved an ROI of close to nothing. A single online takedown, or a parcel stopped at customs, carries very little deterrence. To have a meaningful result, brand owners have to invest in finding those responsible for the most harm and taking decisive enforcement action against them. 

With a limited budget, how do you decide which bad actors to pursue for the greatest deterrent effect? Experience tells us that counterfeiting tends to follow a power law. A small number of operators, skilled at both selling product and avoiding detection, account for most of the volume, while a long tail of opportunistic sellers sit further down the chain. Those serious players, often a network linking manufacturers and traders, are where the real effort, skill and investment belong.

Deterrence can also create a ripple effect. Because of the links between counterfeit operators, news of a raid or an arrest travels fast. We can see deterrence working when the remaining producers start steering clear of your brand altogether, or are pushed into risk-avoidance tactics that eat into their own returns. Awarding damages works in a similar way. Recovering money from infringers raises the cost of operating for them, and those recoveries can also offset some of the cost of enforcement. Financial recovery belongs among the measures of deterrence, but it should never drive the strategy. It is one component of deterrence, not the point of it.

However, achieving progress in deterrence, and measuring it, takes discipline. It means spending less on reactive activities, and investing more in intelligence gathering to identify the key players. It is difficult to argue for such investment if you are not also gathering intelligence to assess the effects of enforcement.  

Brand protection needs its own metrics

The aim for businesses is the same everywhere: push copycats further out of sight of the customer, and raise the costs and risks for those producing the counterfeits. What differs from one business to the next is the mix of tactics used to get there. Brand protection needs an agreed vocabulary that turns enforcement from something resembling a dark art into a discipline, the results of which senior management can actually see.

That shift matters more with each passing year. As counterfeiting spreads and a company’s value rests ever more on the trust people place in its brand, the case for protecting it will only grow. The businesses that can show, in plain terms, what that protection delivers are the ones that will keep funding it properly.