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Marketing

What is The Gray Market, and How to Protect Against it?

The gray market, gray economy, and gray securities. Here we are talking about gray market products rather than gray securities or the gray economy.

Published

1 month ago

September 16, 2021

TwinzTech

5 Things To Learn Immediately To Succeed As An Online Marketer

Three things could be confused with one another: the gray market, gray economy, and gray securities. Here we are talking about gray market products rather than gray securities or the gray economy. Gray securities are shares of a corporation traded before being publicly distributed. At the same time, the gray economy is made of assets and services that elude state taxation.

1. So, what is the gray market?

Anti-counterfeit items that are sold legitimately but outside sanctioned distribution ways are called gray market goods. It hurts the brand and violates the intellectual property protection of any business. The gray market includes everything from vehicles and cameras to software and medicines. The gray market has been running for a long time. To quickly explain it, let’s take a more straightforward example.

The first thing that a manufacturer or brand does is sell a product to a distributor. After that, the distributor sells it to accredited retail shops. Subsequently, those outlets sell the product to buyers. Although this might be a way to sell anti-counterfeit items, it still hurts a brand. In a perfect system, the precise quantity of products would be produced and put up for retail, hoping that the public would purchase all of it.

Nevertheless, the reality is a bit different. If a merchant or retailer is left with surplus or old stock, they can sell it at slashed rates to other traders. This violates intellectual property protection, but some merchants still chose to sell surplus stock to such dealers.

These traders later market the store to the public at further discounted prices. And it is way easier to fool the public because unauthorized sellers often look the same to customers as authorized sellers. The only noticeable contrast is lower costs. But these traders can’t provide company warranties. And some of the products might not satisfy regulatory criteria for the country in which they are being sold.

Gray Market

Sometimes the brands or distributors supply the gray market themselves. However, brands usually refrain from doing so as it hurts their reputation and helps those retailers who sell counterfeit items.

2. How to protect against the gray market?

The first step is to identify unapproved dealers. Knowing who is running the gray market is the key to stopping them. And the best way to monitor the gray market dealers is to look for the products at lower prices than the official retailers or sites. For brands, they must watch the MAP of the products. Most of the MAP violators are often connected to the gray market.

Secondly, the brands must educate their consumers about the official stores’ sites. While advertising and marketing products, the brands can easily throw in the knowledge and importance of buying the products from original and authorized stores and locations. Consumer education helps offline and online brand protection, allows customers to purchase anti-counterfeit and authentic products and gives the customer a warranty.

If the brand spots gray market retailers, they can send a cease-and-desist letter. It serves as a prelude for the subsequent legal actions that the brand can take in case the dealer doesn’t stop selling unsanctioned products. The brands can take legal steps because they violate intellectual property protection and MAP violations, including many other offenses.

Business

Getting Better ROI On Your Salesforce Marketing Cloud With Ready To Use Solutions

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful tool that can be used to achieve success in marketing. It has the power of automation, which takes much of the work out for you.

Published

4 days ago

October 14, 2021

TwinzTech

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful tool that can be used to achieve success in marketing. It has the power of automation, which takes much of the work out for you. The Marketing Cloud offers many features and tools that are ready for your use. Also, you don’t need to worry about data security, as you can use the DESelect for managing your data effectively with complete safety.

In this blog post, we will discuss the top three ways the data can help increase the ROI in the marketing cloud.

Table of Contents

1. Dial-up you’re digital.

At this point, companies are spending more than ever on digital advertising. As a result of the amount paid and increased competition for consumer attention, marketers need to look at their marketing mix differently from year to year and even by month. This is where ready-to-use Marketing Enablement Solutions come into play.

Ready-to-use solutions offer your company an opportunity to try new technologies without significant financial commitment or development resources – all while reducing operational costs through streamlined integrations across multiple applications with one API call.

That is why marketers should look for ready-to-use solutions to do more with less. Ready-to-use applications also provide access for many pre-built integrations that can be customized, allowing you the ability to quickly deploy new technologies into your marketing stack and ultimately increase ROI without requiring additional resources or significant financial investments.

2. Reduce the number of texts you send

In digital marketing, less is more. We’ve all had the feeling of being relentlessly pursued by a business to the point where we tune out and switch off. To treat the condition, you’ll need a reliable source of consumer data as well as connections across contact centers, e-commerce, marketing, or other platforms.

Run a Better Business With These Key Tips

Keeping your messages concise, on topic, but not too repetitive during a period of message saturation will help you save money (efficiently) and get more answers (effectiveness). You may use strategies to increase your return on investment, such as:

People that have an open investigation should not see social advertisements.
Merge customer information
Sending fewer communications to those who are overworked is a good idea

3. Accelerate the planning process (Optimization)

It’s a known fact that brainstorming and planning are crucial steps in any project. However, marketers and creatives often hit a snag: they need to work together to get the best results. You can’t just start creating content without knowing what you want to convey or how your target audience might perceive whatever message you’re trying to send them.

Marketers may know their audience inside out but still lack creative skills. At the same time, designers might be well equipped to create many visuals in stunning quality for your brand but don’t always understand or agree with what you’re trying to convey (and vice versa). The entire process could take weeks — if not months — when it should only take days at most.

4. The Bottom Line

We hope that you’ve understood how a business can get a better ROI with ready-to-use solutions. Getting started is easy when you have solutions already built for your business. Solutions are pre-built configurations of the Marketing Cloud developed in conjunction with our industry-leading partners, meaning they’re optimized to get you up and running quickly while delivering better ROI on marketing investments.