There is a company based not far from where I live, in Munich, that lost an estimated €10 million in revenue to counterfeits in the space of a few months.

Not because they had neglected their IP. On the contrary: they had filed patents, registered trademarks, and built a legally defensible product from the ground up. What they hadn’t fully anticipated was the gap between having rights and being able to exercise them at the speed and scale that viral growth demands.

When co-founder Lena Jüngst spoke publicly about the experience, she said something that has stayed with me: “I think one thing that is a myth is that once you have those IP rights, you are shielded from infringement, which is not the case.”

Don’t get me wrong. Even though I’m not an IP expert, I still know that registration and enforcement are two different disciplines, and that rights require infrastructure, preparation and, in many cases, specialist partnerships in order to be exercised. I also know that the moment of crisis is the worst time to lay the groundwork.

The question that the air up story raises for me is not about the company. It’s about a structural gap that will be familiar to many IP experts: the knowledge was available, the expertise existed, and yet the conversation happened too late to change the outcome.

The timing problem in IP advisory

There is a pattern that surfaces regularly in conversations with IP professionals about their positioning.

A company encounters a problem: a counterfeit flood, a competitor filing in a space they assumed was theirs, a design that was never protected. They call their IP advisor. The advisor solves the problem, often with considerable skill. But the conversation about prevention (about what could have been anticipated, structured differently, filed earlier) happens too late to change the outcome.

This is the firefighter position. And it is not a reflection of insufficient expertise. It’s a reflection of insufficient visibility at the moment when the decisions were still open.

Air up filed its EU trademark in December 2018, before the product launched at scale, before virality, before anyone was copying them. That anticipatory move did not prevent the counterfeit crisis. But it created the legal foundation that made enforcement possible rather than retrospective. The advisor who thinks in those terms (and sees around the corners a client cannot yet see) is worth a different kind of relationship than the one who arrives after the damage is done.

The distance between those two positions is, in large part, a communication challenge.

The myth worth communicating

Jüngst’s candour about IP protection is more than a memorable quote. It points to one of the most valuable things an IP expert can make visible through their communication: the gap between what clients assume IP rights do and what they actually require to function.

Most clients, especially in fast-growing companies, operate on the assumption that registration is protection. They do not naturally think about enforcement infrastructure, about customs partnerships, about the difference between having a claim and being able to exercise it across multiple jurisdictions. The air up case, which eventually involved customs training, Chinese law firm partnerships, marketplace takedown campaigns, and Unified Patent Court proceedings simultaneously, illustrates both the operational complexity of enforcement, and how methodically a well-prepared company can navigate it when the foundation has been laid in advance.

The expert who communicates this gap, not to create anxiety, but as a form of honest orientation, is the one who gets called while there is still time to act. In credence markets, where clients cannot easily evaluate the quality of advice before they need it, this kind of anticipatory framing is one of the strongest positioning signals available.

When the knowledge behind the work becomes the communication

What makes the air up case instructive beyond its IP details is a structural pattern.

The founders built their entire communication (the product story, the investor narrative, the brand identity) around the scientific concept at the heart of their patent: retronasal olfaction. They did not simplify it. They made it relevant. They gave non-specialists a reason to care about it, because understanding it was the only way to understand why the product worked at all.

The result is a company where the technology, the IP portfolio, and the market story are not three separate things. They are one coherent argument, expressed in different registers depending on the audience.

For IP experts, the equivalent is not a product story. It’s a thinking story: the consistent articulation of how you approach a specific category of problems, what you watch for that others overlook, where the real risk tends to hide. This is the knowledge that lives inside client meetings and advisory relationships. When made visible through communication, it changes when and why clients think of you.

This is different from publishing technical analysis for specialist audiences, and different from describing services. It’s the expression of professional judgment in a form that decision-makers, who are not IP specialists, can use to assess whether you are the right person to call before the problem becomes irreversible.

The positioning shift in practice

In the previous column, I described four ways IP experts make their expertise visible: by making their thinking observable, by turning knowledge into entry points, by building authority through consistent topic ownership, and by gaining credibility through recognition within the professional ecosystem.

Each of these strategies, applied deliberately, moves an expert toward the architect position.

The expert who regularly frames a specific category of IP risk, not just when a case arises, but as an ongoing analytical practice, becomes associated with that category in their readers’ minds. The expert whose commentary anticipates developments rather than reacting to them signals a quality of attention that clients value precisely because they cannot replicate it themselves. And the expert who acknowledges the limits of IP protection, what registration cannot do, where enforcement becomes difficult, builds a more durable form of trust than the one who only presents the upside.

None of this requires a dramatic change in how IP experts work. It requires a more deliberate connection between how they think and how they communicate.

The air up case is useful here not as a template, but as a reminder that coherence between knowledge and communication is not a marketing technique. It’s a structural advantage. The experts who achieve it are harder to replace, easier to recommend, and more likely to be present at the moment when the most consequential decisions are still open. In credence markets, expertise does not compete through visibility of results, but through visibility of thinking.

That is the architect’s position. And it is available to any IP expert willing to make their thinking visible before the fire starts.

In my next column, I will look more closely at how sense-making and framing help translate complexity into something decision-makers can actually use, without sacrificing rigour or credibility.

Until then, a question to reflect on:

Think of the last three clients who called you at a moment of crisis. At what earlier point in their journey could you realistically have been part of the conversation and what would have needed to be different for that to happen?

About the columnist

Giulia Donato
Branding & Communication Advisor | Executive Coach | Lecturer
people & brand strategies
www.donatostrategies.com