Unless you are the sole owner of a business, you will have other stakeholders of some form or another who have a financial interest in your organisation.
If their ongoing investment is not to be put at risk, you will need to keep their confidence as stakeholder support is something that can be easily lost in situations where they feel that the leadership of an organisation is not doing what it should.
One of the areas that is very vulnerable to stakeholder concern is that of corporate governance. In other words, people who own part of your company in one way or another expect to see it being run in appropriate fashion and that steps are taken as a matter of course to protect their investment.
Clearly, brand protection, Australia and elsewhere, is an important part of that equation.
Your stakeholders will demand that you take all reasonable steps to ensure that one of your most important assets, your brand, is being insulated as far as is possible from the attentions of counterfeiters. Once a perception grows that you are failing to do so, particularly if illegal reproductions of your brand start to appear in volume in the marketplace, then confidence in the way you are running your business can evaporate overnight.
That’s why it is important to get to grips with everything that brand protection involves. Of course, we believe that our own solutions are second to none in that respect but there are other things that your business should perhaps also be doing in parallel.
It is always more reassuring to stakeholders to see the leadership of a company proactively getting to grips with this issue themselves, rather than only doing so when external auditors are making notes to the effect that more needs to be done or where business starts to suffer as a result of the impact of fakes on the market.