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Pharma Business Designing A Brand Protection Organization by Ron Guido I n recent years, many life sciences companies have formalized their processes and expertise to combat counterfeiting through the establishment of a relatively new business discipline known as brand protection. Of course, the first two questions that come to mind are "What is brand protection?" and "Why is it important?" The answers to these questions lie in three value generators that are emerging within brand-protection-savvy companies. Concerned executives are taking a proactive approach to elevate anticounterfeiting activities from a "see-and-treat" mentality (i.e. security breaches) to a more strategic role within the organization. WHAT IS BRAND PROTECTION? Simply stated, brand protection is the collection of capabilities and activities conducted by a company and its stakeholders to help prevent unauthorized use of intellectual property and/or commerce associated with that company's brands and trademarks. In today's world of global trade and complex supply networks, brand protection is not a luxury; it is a necessary core competence for any organization that commercializes popular brands. Like all well-established business functions that incubated from unstructured beginnings, the work of protecting brands originated in the trademark law group, supported by corporate security, quality, compliance, supply chain management, and, of course, brand management. Brand protection is still a nascent function in corporate society, emerging from and nurtured by the wisdom of these important supporting functions. However, as the discipline matures, even if brand protection 42 LifeScienceLeader.com continues to exist as a virtual function, the major differentiating element over traditional ad hoc working teams is the creation of a sustainable learning environment dedicated to preventive measures. WHERE BRAND PROTECTION RESIDES Assuming your company decides to coalesce its focus against counterfeiters within a dedicated organizational unit, the next decision to be addressed is where should the brand protection function report. This will depend upon a number of factors related to the structure of your corporate footprint with various legal and commercial entities and how centralized or decentralized your structure has become. It also depends upon the roles and responsibilities embodied in your business alliances and comarketing partnerships, as well as your level of contracted manufacturing and distribution. Having said this, because brand protection must become a featured "discipline" for your company to realize its full value and since such a discipline will strongly promote best practices across the business, an enterprise-based organization makes the most sense. By reporting up to a centralized function, brand protection will command the influence across organizational lines necessary to effect important operational changes. The goal is to rapidly shift the culture from one that responds to incidents as a set of uncoordinated events to one that takes a strategic position against brand attacks and supply chain integrity October 2013 issues. Furthermore, a single "voice" on brand positions and policies is important in communicating with affiliated organizations, the public, and the industry at large. Specifically within an organization, the brand protection role functions well when operationally aligned with supply chain management, quality/regulatory/compliance, and legal or strategic marketing. Of these, supply chain management is perhaps the best nest for brand protection expertise, since a large portion of preventive best practices apply to the core supply chain functions of plan, procure, make, ship, and service. THE VALUE OF A BRAND PROTECTION FUNCTION As mentioned above, the primary thrust of brand protection is prevention. Sustained preventive measures lead to the single greatest value driver of this work — patient safety. We can stop here because there is no call to action more significant than a life protected or assuring a life-enhancing medicine is safely delivered to a patient in need. Yet to help appreciate the full value proposition of brand protection, it is important for business-minded leaders to know that such an investment in resources can yield significant returns for the company, even establishing brand protection as a profit center. Agreed, it is extremely difficult to quantify the business impact that counterfeits and illegal diversion have on our operation and subsequently calculate the cost/ benefit of countermeasures. This dilemma is largely attributable to the obscurity of