We’ve seen it time and time again: You’re tired of defending your brand protection costs to the C-suite, and you’re tired of seeing high takedown numbers yet minimal brand impact.

Brand protection reporting has one recurring failure mode.

Let’s say a GC or IP lead brings program numbers like takedown volume by quarter, platforms covered, and listings removed into a budget conversation. If an exec asks, which of these created a significant impact for us?, what would the answer be?

Many teams wouldn’t have one. Because the reporting was never built to answer that question.

To address this (and to help brand protection teams justify their work to the C-suite), Alexis Malmberg, Customer Success Lead at MarqVision, would build the reporting framework in reverse: start from the follow-up question, then work backwards into the data.

Whether a client is a single-founder SMB or enterprise account, the ROI reporting problem comes down to having the numbers, but missing the story.

A customer often arrives with a clear sense of what they want to enforce, such as counterfeits on Amazon or infringing listings on Alibaba, but without a clear picture of how that problem connects to their actual business. Build the reporting forward from there and it will track activity accurately and impact not at all.

This is why the kickoff runs in the opposite direction. "One of the most important elements of the kickoff is doing deep discovery with the customer," says Alexis. "Making sure we really understand their problem and their business. So then we're able to help articulate how the problem impacts their business."

Discovery is where three connections get made, and each one determines a different part of the report:

The first sets what a removal is worth: knowing where the brand actually sells, and which product lines carry the margin, is what makes platform-level weighting possible later. The second gives the report a second signal — teams that track support tickets tied to counterfeit confusion or scam complaints tend to see that number move before volume does. The third is often missed, but is just as necessary for a clear vision. A brand that just started marketing in Southeast Asia will see infringement spike there long before its trademarks catch up.

Which is exactly why the next step is the IP portfolio.

MarqVision's onboarding team audits the customer's full IP portfolio before any enforcement strategy is set. When looking into trademarks, authorizations, and documentation, this is where we see any gaps surface.

For example, a brand scaling into a new region for the first time may not have filed trademarks there yet, which changes what can be enforced and how fast it can be enforced. The strategy has to fit the IP that actually exists, not the IP the brand assumes it has.

With the legal foundation mapped, the team assigns ROI assumptions by platform. As Alexis puts it: "If you take down one counterfeit from a known counterfeiting platform, it doesn't necessarily equal one more sale to the brand itself."

A counterfeit bag removed from a marketplace where shoppers went looking for fakes is a different result than a fraudulent listing removed from Amazon, where a real customer was mid-purchase and thought they were buying the real thing. Even though these seem like the same enforcement action, they have different revenue consequences.

Treating those two removals as equivalent, which is exactly what a flat volume number does, is where most reporting loses the room in budget conversations. When a CFO asks which of those 10,000 takedowns moved the needle, a flat volume number has no answer.

The final layer is saturation rate: of the first ten results a customer sees when they search for your product on a given marketplace right now, how many are counterfeit? That number tells a CFO or board whether the market is actually getting cleaner, as opposed to volume simply showing how many products are counterfeit in general.

"Historically in the industry, volume has been the main KPI for success," she says. "But a lot of people will see a high-level number and not really understand what's behind the data." When that happens in a budget conversation, the program loses credibility and the attention of the room.

The framework Alexis builds starts where most reporting stops: at the question leadership will ask next, and works backwards from there.

Learn more about MarqVision’s approach to brand protection (and get a free report) here.

If your current report can answer "how much did we do" but not "what did it change, and for which part of the business," that’s where your reporting needs to be rebuilt from. Adjust that, and the budget conversation becomes the easy part of your work.

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Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next time.

The MarqVision Team