MSD Scalibor

MSD Animal Health is the division dedicated to preserving and improving animal welfare of a pharmaceutical company. Their flagship product on Amazon, Scalibor, attracted fraudulent resellers who connected to the product page with counterfeit products. This had several implications:

• the collars did not protect against parasites, consequently leading customers to leave negative reviews;
• Amazon stopped buying Scalibor from vendors because they could find it at a lower price from fraudulent resellers;
• If the problem had not been resolved, the brand would have withdrawn its investment from the channel.

We enrolled the products in the Transparency program, but ran into an unexpected issue: the reseller who created the product pages back in 2014 listed the brand as MSD Animal Health — a brand not registered in the Brand Registry — instead of Scalibor.

To overcome this problem, we acted on two fronts:

• Repeatedly contacting support until we reached decision-makers on the Amazon Brand Registry team.
• Collaborating with MSD Animal Health lawyers to draft a letter clarifying that the reference brand was Scalibor, highlighting how the impediments to registration to the Transparency program were facilitating the sale of counterfeit products.