A global increase in ecommerce combined with unmonitored online marketplaces and more sophisticated criminal operations leaves brands and consumers exposed to counterfeit products. Product authenticity is a big concern for consumers; new research sponsored by Digimarc shows that 67% of consumers worry about buying fake goods when they buy goods for their home and family. If the brands they buy from have issues with counterfeiting, it can sour their perception. In fact, two thirds of consumers say that if they bought an item that turned out to be counterfeit, it would impact their perception of the brand.
Consumers and their families deserve your real products, and your business deserves a comprehensive solution for product authentication and anti-counterfeiting. But not all brand protection solutions will do. Your business should look for solutions that leverage product digitization for superior benefits compared with the ineffectiveness of current analog operations. Specifically, buyers should expect modern solutions that help:
- Deliver Visibility into Your Exposure - Don't be satisfied or stuck with status quo solutions that prevent you from knowing the size of your problem with counterfeit and diverted goods. Many brands currently use different inspection agencies spread all over the world — each inspecting in their own, often manual, way. This leaves you with no centralized system for product visibility and no single system of record for this type of information. But there is another way. Digitizing your products and aggregating data in a centralized, cloud-based repository gives you greater visibility into what is happening with your products.
- Utilize Your Team More Effectively - Brand protection is a cost center, and those efforts tend to run lean. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by authentication requests from customers and customs agents due to the time it takes to investigate. Seek solutions that can help streamline the response process so your brand protection experts can focus on higher value activities, such as remediation efforts, coordination with law enforcement or proactive planning to limit your risk.
- Lower the Cost of Protection - Many common solutions such as forensic features or holographic stickers have per-unit costs. Even with volume discounts, the more you buy, the more you spend. Seek solutions that don’t require physical protective elements that add up fast — and can have negative environmental impacts.
- Expand Your Reach Exponentially - By offering consumer engagement experiences such as the ability to scan connected products for coupons, recipes, instructions, or exclusive content, you can leverage crowdsourced scanning for authenticity checks by globally dispersed consumers to expand the limited reach of internal brand inspection teams. And, when others, including customs agents, help assess authenticity, you gain access to many new valuable data points about regions where counterfeit and diverted products are prevalent. Best of all, consumers don’t even need to know they’re helping assess authenticity while they engage with your content, so there’s nothing to raise alarm with consumers about potential counterfeits.
- Reveal Intelligence and Insights - Capitalize on real-time data analysis and actionable intelligence about products’ path, provenance, and status in order to reveal new insights about counterfeiting, product diversion, and the health and efficiency of your supply chain and partners. You need easy-to-use dashboards with useful data for a more proactive approach that enables you to anticipate issues and act in advance, not just respond to issues of authenticity after the fact.
If your next brand protection solution doesn’t help you save money, scale and act on new data insights, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and seek a solution that enables you to see everything and achieve anything. Achieve a greater degree of brand integrity with Digimarc.
Discover the Digimarc Brand Integrity solution, and access a free Insights Survey to understand the mindset of modern consumers and their expectations for authentic products.
