Engaging with customs an effective IP protection strategy

Just a registration of intellectual property with IPR wing of custom authorities does not deliver the protection to the brand owners against counterfeit or unsolicited imports. Brand owners need to ensure that goods imported don’t give them an unfair competition in the market and eat their market share or disturb the distribution eco system. There is already a genuine issue related to the legalization of the parallel import , which brand owners need to continuously fight against and to add on to this, is an issue of counterfeit imports & undervalued imports.
To address these issues, brand owners need to continuously innovate in their outer packaging, so that the genuine imports can be identified at the time of landing/verification/ checking at the Indian customs and at the same time continuously educate/ engage with the custom authorities at various ports. The need is to educate the custom officials on key identifiers of the genuine products and also keep them posted of the costs of the goods to curb undervalued imports. There is a need to also engage with the custom officials ate the senior most level and seek their interventions & instructions from time to time. Over the years the professionalism of the senior custom officials have gone up many folds and so the pressure for better revenue collections & protection of the interest of registered corporates.
For all those products which either rely on large imports or have large imports affecting their market share in India, it is important that a formal process is adopted to tackle this issue and not to depend on the CHA’s for interactions & benefit. It is also seen that many of these CHA’s just have average skilled & qualified people, which may not be able to get the desired output from the engagement. Therefore, the need is to engage with professionals with exceptional skill sets, high level integrity, decent connects and an organizational capabilities to train, liaison and engage at various ports across the country.
www.brandsandfakes.com has built a ecosystem across the country to streamline such processes ( training, capacity building, analysis, control) and engage with the custom authorities for relief to the brand owners for all IP related matters.