As a product manager, you need to ensure the safety of your product launches and protect your intellectual property. Leaks of embargoed promotional content could harm your business by benefitting grey markets and counterfeiting.

With Consumer Electronics, product leaks and premature releases bring launch campaign ROI down to 0, while dramatically impacting sales of previous models. Industrilization, sharing marketing campaigns under embargo and population marketplace catalogs are some of the most vulnerable moments of the commercialization of new consumer electronics products. Potential leakers could be internal, marketplaces, influencers, journalists as well as serial tech leakers.

While sharing information internally can seem safe, no workflow is 100% leak-proof. To minimize the risks you need to

• ensure teams know what information is critical and who they can share it with
• safeguard access to sensitive information
• communicate with secure platforms (avoid using sites like WeTransfer or sending sensitive content by email)

From the moment you share information outside your organization, the risk of content leak appears. The more stakeholders involved, the higher the risk. External collaborators and third-party stakeholders should be asked the same level of confidentiality than internal team members. Even if an NDA agreement has been put in place, be aware that it is not always sufficient because it doesn’t prevent someone from disclosing confidential information.

Working with market research agencies, special attention needs to paid to the content that is shared with user panels. You probably need to share sensitive content, such as product photos, packaging and innovations, with the participants of your studies. An NDA does not always provide enough protection. Leaks can have costly impacts for brands and jeopardize their entire stratagies. As service providers, research agencies need to manage this risk.

Willingly or negligently, your recipients can play a role in the risk of your content leaking. The major risk can come from several sources, internal as well as external, first level or intermediary actors. To avoid the risk of leakage, be sure to use a unique and invisible ID like Imatag to track your content and improve trust with your suppliers.