Global brands like Nike, Apple, Adidas, Burberry, Gucci, and Tag-Heuer are justifiably very concerned about Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, and Brazilian product piracy, but according to author Max Lenderman, they shouldn't be all that concerned.



Really?! What's this, you say?

Lenderman does the yeoman's work in his new book, Brand New World: How Paupers, Pirates, and Oligarchs and Shaping Business explaining the nuances of another way of looking at the whole counterfeiting plague that will shock most mid- to large-tier brand manufacturers. Rather than suffer heart palpitations due to how much revenue brands might be leaking to the shanzai (Mandarin for counterfeit) collectives in places like China's notorious Silk Street Mall, they should rather revel how their brands are receiving even more exposure than they might othewise receive through standard marketing techniques and budgets.

In a recent brands study furnished again by Lenderman in his stellar book, Nike, Burberry, and Microsoft were showing whopping revenue gains of 45, 68, and 57 percent respectively since 2001 as a result of their greater "market mind share" from the proliferation of their knockoffs in Chinese and Indian consumer markets.

These are truly startling figures for what Lenderman refers to as no more than a handful of twenty-five MNCs who admit in statistical studies to being most concered by pernicious brand piracy. So the new consensus opinion seems to be: rather than scramble to bite their collective finger- and toenails down to nubs, brands should salute -- if not outright gooily embrace -- how their goods are proliferating throughout developing markets with a reach and depth not even their tried-and-true marketing efforts could ever achieve.

These remarkable gains are a fortunate consequence of the absolute Chinese disregard for intellectual property protection, and I doubt any MNC marketing wing could run scenarios which could accurate account for this phenomenon. Tell me the last time when a major brand marketer could tabulate metrics on revenue their firm might directly receive from rampant piracy?

If any of this is remotely interesting to you, I've been gaining all sorts of insights this past week from Lenderman's truly engaging study, his call to action for global manufacturers and marketers to stop, sit, and listen to the several other ways they might successfully counter the priacy threat, which in any event shows zero signs of abating.

In fact, in the case of Chinese shanzai violators, the more aggressive an international brand is about policing their universal brand equity, the greater the incentive is for the Chinese pirates to abuse it, almost akin to children cruisin' for a bruisin' from their parents. What Lenderman seems to be saying is that it's far from a lost cause; there are ways of working in concert with pirates, rather, by utilizing their rampant audacity as a kind of high-octane boost to the millions of dollars in marketing budgets already spent by mega-brands. With this reinvigorated perspective, suggest Lenderman, brands can cease burning through their scarce resources currently spent on global policing efforts to better spent them on doing what MNCs do best: rapidly innovating and prototyping, bringing exciting, useful new products to market quickly.

Brand New World is welcome infusion of pure oxygen during these current crisis times. Rather than despair at those who wantonly disregard your brand's inherent equity, there exist alternative ways to work alongside the violators by bolting your pre-existing efforts onto theirs, turning their profligate efforts into direct advantages for you, the innovator, changing the rules of the game yet again.

A coup even the likes of Sun Tzu himself would appreciate...