Brand Monitoring & Online Enforcement

The question

A brand that sells well gets copied. Counterfeit products appear on marketplaces, a lookalike website collects customers' log-in details, an account on social media uses your logo and name to sell something you never made. Most of it you only learn about when a customer complains.

The questions we hear are practical ones. Where is my brand being misused? Which cases deserve action, and which are a distributor or a fan page that is harmless? And once I know, who do I write to, and with what proof?

Clients usually come to us in one of a few situations. A customer or a sales partner reports a fake webshop. A marketplace listing sells goods under your name at a price you cannot match. A new product launch is coming and you want the first weeks protected. Or an earlier takedown worked for a week and the seller came back under another name.

Our approach

We start from your rights. Before monitoring begins we check which trademarks and domain names you hold, in which countries and for which goods and services, because every enforcement route depends on them. Gaps show up at this stage: a mark that is not registered in a market where you sell, for instance.

Monitoring then runs continuously with our online brand monitoring. It discovers lookalike domain names from several independent sources, scores them for similarity and typing mistakes, and recognises cloned websites and copycat sites that belong to the same campaign. It also follows the large marketplaces and more than twenty social platforms. Results are grouped in five channels: marketplaces, social media, websites, domain names and app stores, and they appear in the client portal.

An attorney reviews what the system flags. This is where the judgement sits: whether a seller is authorised, whether a use is genuinely infringing under the EU trade mark rules, whether a reseller can rely on exhaustion of rights, and what the proportionate response is. You can see each detection and tell us to act, investigate or dismiss.

Where action is needed, our takedown workflow prepares the notice for the marketplace, registrar, host or platform. Every action is backed by a timestamped evidence pack, and only an attorney sends the notice. If a notice does not solve the problem, the same file supports a cease-and-desist letter, a complaint under the UDRP or URS for a domain name, or court proceedings.

In the portal, each detection shows what was found, when, in which channel, and the evidence captured. Your instruction (act, investigate or dismiss) is recorded with it, so the attorney knows what you decided and why. When the same seller returns under another name, the link to earlier detections lets us treat it as a pattern and not as a new, isolated case, which changes the response: a repeat infringer justifies a firmer letter or a complaint to the platform about repeated infringement.

What you get

• A picture of how your brand is being used and misused online, by channel, kept up to date in the client portal.
• A prioritised list of detections, each reviewed by an attorney, with a recommendation.
• Notices and letters in English, Dutch, French or German, sent by us on your instruction.
• For domain names, a complaint prepared from the evidence already gathered.
• Periodic reporting on what was found, what was done and what remains open, which also documents your enforcement activity.

We do not promise that a platform will remove every listing or that a domain will be transferred. Platforms apply their own rules, and a notice that is incomplete or aimed at a lawful reseller can backfire. The value of the service is that the right case reaches the right route with the right proof.

A short scenario: a Ghent cosmetics brand launches a new serum. In the first month, monitoring shows two lookalike domain names and a dozen marketplace listings. The attorney clears three listings from an authorised distributor, sends notices on the others and sends a cease-and-desist letter to the domain holder, who transfers the names. The brand keeps the file for the repeat case.

Next step

Send us the list of your trademarks and domain names, and the markets that matter most to you. We will tell you what monitoring would cover and where the first gaps are.

Schedule a meeting or contact us.