Best Practice

Posted on by ursamajor27

INTRODUCTION

 Project Overview

Brandjacking is an activity whereby someone acquires or otherwise assumes the online identity of another entity for the purposes of acquiring that person’s or business’s brand equity.

The famous label Louis Vuitton gets brandjacked by an artist to simply make a strong words out of a campaign. Louis Vuitton is the world’s most valuable luxury brand founded on Rue Neuve des Capucines in Paris, France in 1854 by Louis Vuitton. Products made by Louis Vuitton includes leather goods, handbags, trunks, shoes, watches, jewelry and accessories

In year 2007, Louis Vuitton gets brandjacked by Nadia Plesner, a Danish artist who has been sued by Louis Vuitton Mallatier for brand jacking the flagship Murakami handbag on her t-shirt(depicting a malnourished child holding a designer dog and a designer bag, and used it on T-shirts and posters to raise funds for the charity “Divest for Darfur”). The lawsuit has brought Nadia much publicity and much traffic to her website and Facebook page, which in a little over a week has amassed 2,260 fans. Nadia argues that Louis Vuitton is trying to destroy her life. She claims that she never used the (Murakami) bag, but her image was “inspired by the bag”. Nadia never wanted to humiliate the image of LV but instead use it to make a point that the media cares more for Paris Hilton extravaganza’s more than the genocide in the nation of Darfur.

 

Still, the court has been in favor of LV and ruled that the image was a clear infringement of copyright. Despite of the ruling, Plesner continued to use the image for arguing on artistic freedom, and posted the copies of the infringement letter on her website. So the company Louis Vuitton, demanded $7,500 (5,000 Euro) for each day Plesner continues to sell the “Simple Living” products, $7,500 for each day the original infringement letter is published on her website and $7,500 a day for using the name “Louis Vuitton” on her website, plus legal and enforcement costs.

In October 2008, Louis Vuitton declared that the company had dropped its lawsuit but have since reopened it along with a new €205,000 claim due to a painting(Dafurnica) by the same artist.

This time Plesner chose to countersue and the case led her to the Hague, where in June 2011, after a long and costly legal battle, The European Court of Justice, rejected Vuitton’s arguments, annulled the accumulated fine of 485000€ and ordered the brand to pay 15000€ for Nadia’s legal costs.

Current State of the Organization

As of now, Louis Vuitton is the world’s most valuable luxury brand and is a division of LVMH. Its products include leather goods, handbags, trunks, shoes, watches, jewelry and accessories. Most of these are adorned with the LV monogram. It is one of the most profitable brands in the world with profit margins approaching 40%.

Scope

The project tackles on why Nadia Plesner brandjack the label Louis Vuitton and how Louis Vuitton sue and demands about the issue to gain attention on her campaign about genocide.

Purpose and objectives

  • To open the eyes of the society on how strong the media can manipulate and influence.
  • To know what are the possible thing happen when someone do a brandjack.
  • To know the rights and consequences of the victim of brandjack.

Benefits to stakeholders

Because of the publicity that the organization has encounter the product of the company has caught attention of many people. The more people talk about the case (web brandjacking), the company is gaining more demands on their product which the company gains more income, this benefits all stakeholders.

Project team structure

        Members work together in one place to help each other on achieving certain goals. Each members had different parts to work with and have divided the members to work accordingly on different parts. Dividing members have result to sharing of knowledge and skills transfer.

 

Benchmark

Exxon Mobil Corp. is an American multinational oil and gas corporation headquartered in Irving, Texas. It is the largest direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller‘s Standard Oil Company, and was formed on November 30, 1999 by the merger of Exxon (originally the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey) and Mobil (originally the Standard Oil Company of New York). The world’s 5th largest company by revenue, ExxonMobil is also the third largest publicly traded company by market capitalization. The company was ranked No. 6 globally in Forbes Global 2000 list in 2014. ExxonMobil was the second most profitable company in the Fortune 500 in 2014.  ExxonMobil is the largest of the world’s supermajors with daily production of 3.921 million BOE. In 2008, this was approximately 3 percent of world production, which is less than several of the largest state-owned petroleum companies. When ranked by oil and gas reserves, it is 14th in the world—with less than 1 percent of the total. ExxonMobil’s reserves were 25.2 billion BOE (barrels of oil equivalent) at the end of 2013 and the 2007 rates of production were expected to last more than 14 years. With 37oil refineries in 21 countries constituting a combined daily refining capacity of 6.3 million barrels (1,000,000 m3), ExxonMobil is the largest refiner in the world, a title that was also associated with Standard Oil since its incorporation in 1870.

Best practice/s

  • Settings rules and regulation

From time to time, workers may violate the policies you have established for your business. Even if an employee breaks the rules with the best of intentions, the flow of the workplace can be impacted negatively. When your entire team is working toward the same goal and following the same regulations, it can be easier for you to fulfill the goals you have for your company. When you truly understand why your rules are in place, it can be easier to communicate that urgency to your team.

  • Knowing your employees

Management should know its employees well. Here are some factors that would help management to prevent betrayal of employees.

 

  • Self-protect

There are simple things you can do to begin to protect yourself from threats within your business. It’s not about distrusting your staff; instead just make sure you really know them.

–          Pre-employment checks

One of the simplest things you can do to reduce the chances of internal fraud is to make sure you know who you are employing in the first place. Always ask for at least two independent references when taking on new staff and verify their personal information and background wherever possible. Be thorough and keep chasing these references – however long it takes is time well spent. More detailed information on what you can do when employing staff is provided by the Fraud Advisory Panel.

–          Anti-fraud policy statements

Setting the tone from the top is crucial in deterring employee fraud, and adopting an anti-fraud policy statement is one way of communicating a strong fraud prevention message to your staff. Such a statement provides clear guidelines for preventing, detecting and dealing with fraud, and can help to establish a zero tolerance culture to emphasize that fraud is completely unacceptable. The Fraud Advisory Panel has produced useful guidance on what this should include, in addition to a template policy that you can adapt and adopt for your business.

–          Staff behavior

Its good management practice to monitor your employees’ performance and understand what makes them tick, but this routine procedure can also unearth internal threats to your business. Fraudsters’ behaviors can often betray their crimes, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye out for members of staff who are acting out of character. This can include things like a sudden change of lifestyle or unexplained wealth, reluctance to take a holiday or promotion, or being scornful of systems and controls.  More often than not there are simple explanations for these behaviors, but it is sensible managerial practice to be alert to the possibility that those acting out of character could be up to no good. Remember, even long-serving employees could be tempted to commit fraud under certain circumstances, so it is equally as important to watch out for any strange behavior in those you think you know well.

–          Processes and controls

To understand where you may be targeted by an internal fraudster, it’s important to first know where your valuable assets are. Once you’ve identified them, you’ll need to think about how to reduce the chances of those assets being defrauded or stolen by rogue employees, and then build controls into your routine business processes. Ways of doing this will vary depending on the business and asset, but will include things like managerial oversight of finance processes, ensuring that one person cannot transfer high value assets by themselves or without sign-off; regular checks and audits of your assets, and restricting access to key assets to only those who need to use them.

  • Monitoring your brand in social network

Social media platforms offer the potential to increase your public profile. You have the ability to create grassroots campaigns, engage with influencers in your industry, share content from them and stay active in conversations. If you create and share worthwhile content, you’ll be ready for the time when industry influencers send a flood of new followers your way and other doors for opportunities might open. But this opportunities might be open also to other competitors still if monitoring is implemented a certain organization/company could monitor what is happening and what might their consumer want/need so that us an organization/company we could provide it.

  • Right Response in a certain problem

There are things to be considered before responding in a certain problem. Knowing what to do and what may be the consequences that you will be having for a certain action. Because responding immediately would get you or someone in trouble so think we should think what would be the right response in a certain problem for an organization/company to do.

Companies implementing the best practices

  • JC Penney
  • Johnson and Johnson
  • Starbucks

How implemented

All of the companies that a had the same case implemented cease and desist wherein is a document sent to an individual or business to halt purportedly unlawful activity (“cease”) and not take it up again later (“desist”). The letter may warn that if the recipient by deadlines set in the letter does not cease and desist specified conduct, or take certain actions, that party may be sued.

Implementation challenges and results

The companies have cost them money as they try to resolve their problems even though not knowing what will be the outcome for their company(if they will win or not). In this case, the Louis Vuitton had brought the case to the court and according to Wikipedia (and other articles) Louis Vuitton had lost their case against the brand jacking of their label to Nadia Plesner while the Exxon Mobil had not found out the true identity of Janet(the one who made the fraud account) but it had opened Exxon Mobil to social media.

Benefits

The benefits of the company that implemented the best practice/s to resolve the case that they encountered is that they can now know the process that they should apply in handling a certain case such as the case that they recently encountered and also this could also serve as a move of prevention for them so that the case that they encountered will never happen again. 

 

Project Methodology

  • Planning- The distribution of works to be done by each member.
  • Researching- Each member search for the assigned topic in the internet. Studying the background of the organization.
  • Analyzing- Looking for the problem the organization had encountered (how and why the issue started) what the organization did to resolve the problem, and what had been the outcome.
  • Plotting- Compiling all the information that had been gathered by each member.

Implementation Strategy

Louis Vuitton sent a Cease and desist order to Danish art student Nadia Plesner but then Nadia still pursue on implementing her campaign with a different piece (the oil painting Dafurnica) that led to a new lawsuit. So, Louis Vuitton demanded that Plesner pay 5000€ for each day that the painting was exhibited in public or online, claiming that the art work represented a “threatening infringement of intellectual property.”

Success measures

            The project have a high rate of success because many people had cooperated and opinions are not set aside. People from the internet had shared their own opinions about the issue which makes the project more reliable.

Lesson Learned

  • Being aware that while we are enjoying our riches there are someone who enjoys our trashes.
  • Even the intension is good, know first if there will be someone that can be affected.
  • Being an artist you must know the copyright rights, because as an artist in your design you have a right to be credited or ask a permission if someone want to use your piece, because as an artist it is a disrespect if you just only grab a piece without asking a permission or

Bibliography

Appendices  

         Regarding the issue of brandjacking of the label Louis Vuitton, surveys have been brought to many citizens on what can they say about the issue in their own opinion. Some says it could have been Rolex, Lexus, Gucci, sadly for LV, it was theirs.

According to Jeremiah  Owyang LV has nothing to do with Darfur, and LV is being dragged through the African mud. LV’s response is pretty standard and expected, to protect the image and brand that they’ve been working to build. He is sympathetic to LV getting brand jacked because LV had nothing to do with anything that occurs within the Darfur community.

Louis Vuitton though has many other options like 1: They could have join the campaign, drop the lawsuit, and work with Save Darfur organization to help raise funds by doing events, creating a specific product, or help promote the cause. But this would be a nod to activitists everywhere to brand jack major brands in order to get support –and funding, the cycle will continue.- John Bell 2:  Drop the suit. Walk away and wait for the dust to settle. This will have no long term negative impact on their brand – Alyson Byrne.

Twitter users voice their own opinion regarding the issue and here’s what was said in public:

ronbailey: – why not just donate a few bucks to the cause in exchange for her NOT using LV products in her campaign?

Dan Lewis: legalities aside, I’d be mighty upset if my name were wrongly associated with genocide. the artist is morally wrong here, no doubt

Alberto Nardelli: besides LV point being morally disturbing, IP case doesn’t stand: would be like campbells suing warhol

Kim Pearson: I’m a former PR person, not a lawyer, but I’d argue that LV is doing itself more harm by its response, not protecting its brand.

Ed Saipetch: ironically in the same vain, I heard the (RED) campaign benefits retailers and product producers much much more than the AIDS fight

Rainne: I say not, b/c the artist did not use the vuitton pattern, she simply invoked its similarity.

mlogan: They turned this into a big story and managed to put themselves on the wrong side of a humanitarian crisis. Smooth

bethdunn: it’s another case of a company doing more harm than good to their brand by trying to halt something they can’t control

ronbailey: how has LV been harmed by Nadia’s campaign? – She was poking fun at celebrity culture in general, not LV in particular

ronbailey: They could have easily turned a blind eye to the whole episode.

(The tshirt design “Simple Living” with Nadia Plesner in the middle)

(The painting “Dafurnica”)

 

 

 

 

 

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