What is brand protection? Online vs physical products

Brand protection is everything a company does to stop others from trading on its name, its designs and its products without permission. Protecting your brand means acting in three places: in law, where the rights are held and enforced; online, where fakes and impostors are sold and advertised; and in the physical product, where a buyer finally decides whether an item is real.

The three overlap, but they use different tools and are usually run by different teams. Legal work belongs to counsel, online enforcement to an in-house team or an online brand-protection service, and product protection to operations, packaging and supply chain. Much of what is written about brand protection covers the first two. The third is the one a buyer holds in their hand.

Counterfeits take sales, but they also take trust, and some of them are dangerous. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) estimate that global trade in counterfeit goods was worth approximately $467 billion in 2021, up to 2.3% of total global imports. They note that fakes undermine legitimate businesses, deprive governments of revenue and pose risks to health and safety, since no responsible company stands behind them.¹

The cost does not stop at the point of sale. In a 2025 report from the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns, based on a survey of large US retailers, 9% of all returns were fraudulent, and 64% of retailers that track such incidents reported more decoy returns, such as counterfeit items sent back in place of the genuine one. A brand that cannot tell its own product from a copy pays for the copy twice: once in the lost sale, and again in the refund.²

The counterfeit statistics explainer sets out the rest by sector, origin and route, with how each number is measured.

Every other kind of brand protection rests on rights. The OECD and EUIPO, following the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), define a counterfeit as a good that infringes a trademark, a design right or a patent, and a pirated good as one that infringes copyright. A brand that has not registered its marks and designs in the markets where it sells and manufactures has little to enforce.¹

Rights also have to be put in front of the people who enforce them. In the United States, Customs and Border Protection's e-Recordation Program lets rights holders record trademarks and copyrights registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office or the Copyright Office, so that officers at the border can enforce them.⁴

Enforcement then needs the rights holder to act. In the EU's 2025 enforcement figures, 16 million tobacco items from one detention were released because the right holder did not take action.⁵

Online brand protection finds and removes the listings, ads, social accounts and websites that use a brand without permission. The OECD and EUIPO report that counterfeiters exploit online platforms and modern logistics, with postal services now the main channel for distributing fakes.¹

In the EU, the Digital Services Act sets the rules for that work, and it has applied in full since 17 February 2024. Hosting services must give anyone an electronic way to report illegal content. A notice should explain why the content is illegal, give its exact location, such as the URL, and normally name the person sending it. Notices from trusted flaggers, a status each country's Digital Services Coordinator awards to independent experts, must be handled with priority. Marketplaces must also collect identifying details from traders before letting them sell to EU consumers.³

Online work is fast and scales well, and it is what online brand-protection services are built to do. Its limit is that it acts on the listing, not the product. A fake bought before the listing came down is still in a buyer's hands, and the next listing is a few minutes' work.

Physical protection works on the item itself and on the chain that makes and moves it. ISO 22383:2020, the international guideline on authentication solutions for material goods, describes their use in anti-counterfeiting, the prevention of product fraud and the prevention of diversion, and says the elements should be chosen after a counterfeiting risk assessment.⁶

• Authentication at the item: a feature in the product that a buyer, a retailer or a customs officer can check, from a covert mark to a secure tag that answers a phone.
• Supply chain controls: knowing which factory made which item, and controlling the packaging, labels and components that make a product look genuine.
• Grey-market diversion: genuine goods sold outside the channels or countries they were meant for, which an item-level record can trace.
• Return fraud: a counterfeit or a different item sent back in place of the one that was sold.

Packaging and labels matter because counterfeiters increasingly assemble fakes close to the market. In the global customs data for 2020–21, 20% of seizures involved packaging, labels and other authentication components, such as holograms or QR codes. A protective feature that can be bought separately can be applied to a fake.¹

ISO 22384:2020 sets out the general method: assess the threats, risks and countermeasures, write a protection plan, put it in place, and keep monitoring whether it works. It asks the plan to consider the product's life cycle, supply chain, manufacturing, data, brand perception and costs. In practice, that comes down to six steps.⁷

• Register your trademarks and designs in every market where you sell or manufacture, and record them with customs.
• Map the risk: which products are copied, where the copies are sold, and which channels they move through.
• Watch the online channels, and use the notice routes marketplaces and social platforms are required to offer.
• Build protection into the product: a verifiable identity for each item, and control of the packaging and labels that make it look genuine.
• Check returns and resale against the item itself rather than a receipt or a photograph.
• Measure what you find and adjust the plan, product by product and market by market.

Vera works on the physical layer, item by item, before and after the sale. For most brands, Vera Tags go in at manufacture: inside a watch, behind the dial; in a handbag, behind the logo or in a fabric patch. A box of tags can be bound to its products before it ships, so each item carries its identity from the factory onward.

Every tap computes a fresh encrypted code with a key that cannot be read off the tag. A forwarded link or a replayed tap reuses an old code, so it is recorded as an invalid scan and shown to the brand and to whoever is holding the item, and a tag Vera did not provision fails verification. A return is checked against the item's certificate rather than the receipt, and an item its owner marks stolen shows that status on every later tap.

The Vera Platform puts failed scans on the map, with each country's invalid-scan and repeat-scan rate. A cluster becomes a market, a seller or an address the legal and online teams can act on, so the product layer feeds the other two.