Gene Zelek is a Partner with Taft Stettinius and Hollister Law Firm. Right after graduating from Law, he practiced as a marketing lawyer at a big law firm prior to working as an in-house at Quaker Oats where he also became a brand manager. When he went back to practicing law, he focused on Marketing Law including antitrust, pricing and distribution, and brand protection. Since 1989, Gene has helped design, implement, and enforce more than 470 successful policies addressing minimum resale price, minimum advertised price, and their variants in diverse industries for both consumer and industrial products. 

Gene is co-author of the seminal 2003 antitrust article Establishing and Maintaining an Effective Resale Price Policy: A Colgate How-To, as well as the 2020 Harvard Business Review article, Pricing Policies that Protect Your Brand: How to Prevent Unauthorized Discounting.

In this episode…

There has been rapid growth in the use of online selling channels by brands over the last 20 years. While their views and management of online channels have evolved, there is still work to be done to ensure brand policies are followed across these channels. And these online channels offer greater transparency in pricing which poses benefits and disadvantages to brands and to an extent, to consumers as well.

In this episode, James Thomson interviews Gene Zelek of Taft Stettinius and Hollister Law firm about using pricing policies that solidifies channel management both online and offline. They talk about how pricing transparency brought about by online marketplaces has impacted brands, the various challenges brands face due to pricing discrepancies, and best practices for enforcing pricing policies. Stay tuned.