The threat of counterfeiting of products is a major concern for product manufacturers. It usually happens when the manufacturer’s product is sold through or by an unauthorized seller or channel. Another growing concern is counterfeiting of the manufacturer’s product and its packaging.
It is difficult for a consumer to understand though but a consumer can avoid counterfeited and potentially unsafe products is to purchase the product from an approved retailer. Some companies will only guarantee their products if sold at certain retailers, so consumers should take heed and avoid buying those products elsewhere.
Some of the other steps which can help to Prevent counterfeiting:
Attain Global Visibility: It is very important for a brand to understand and identify the problem of counterfeiting and quantify the world about it. This is will not only help the brands but also will aware the consumers.
Counterfeiter are over a wide array of online channels; all of these, including online marketplaces, e-commerce sites, message boards and the rest, must be monitored and analyzed.
Create A “Fingerprint”: The product’s fingerprint can be any number of things that will alert the brand about its legitimacy. It may be a sticker, a design feature, or some other technology that works for your product line, having something unique to your product can help the brand to discover diverted and counterfeit products in the sales pipelines.
It is important for every brand to take the steps to make it easily identifiable which can protect a company against future losses or court action from products that were unsafe.
Educate consumers: Consumers are the one who can build a business or drop a business. It is important for any brand to help the consumers to know better about the product, its packaging, signature very closely so that the consumer drop purchasing the counterfeited products. To acquire such knowledge, the brands should provide detailed knowledge to the consumers which will help consumers to identify the original products which are available in the market.
The Authentics Foundation and its consumer site, dontbuyfakes.com, have useful resources for consumer education. Also, many brands provide form or email-based mechanisms for reporting suspected infringement. When offering such tools, be sure to reinforce the benefits of buying authentic goods from authorized sellers.
Adding invisible technology or watermark: Invisible inks (seen only under blue light) can be used for anti-diversion codes on a product’s packaging. The invisible codes can be placed in multiple places both inside and outside the carton/package. Invisible technologies for tracking provide companies with the security of knowing whether a product on the shelf is on the “right” shelf and if it’s legitimate. For eg: there were huge duplication of INR 500 notes few years back to avoid such duplication government took initiate and designed the notes in such way that even a blind person can identify original over duplicate. Thus the use of advanced technology on INR500 notes has helped to avoid counterfeiting and also to aware consumer about the duplication.
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Online intelligence needs to inform offline defense measures: It is quite obvious that offline measures — physical investigations, factory raids and other activities — can be costly and time-consuming, it’s critical to know where brand should be focused.
But if any brand introduced online intelligence can help identify the most egregious infringers, so that offline defensive efforts can be focused where they’ll be most effective.
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