With many products being vulnerable to counterfeiting and refilling, it is important to ensure that your company has product protection. It is a serious crime and one that can happen to many companies. Thus, you must ensure that you take the right measures to secure and protect your products.
In the following lines, we will examine:
• What product protection is
• Why it is important
• How to protect branded products
• The main counterfeit issues and how to find solutions
Product protection is to protect branded products against counterfeiting and refilling crimes. It focuses on the technical solution to protect a product against piracy. Many companies and products are being plagued by traceability and counterfeit fraud, which can hinder your business.
Product protection is a huge and very important step towards brand security and exclusivity. Single measure security is no longer secure enough, even if you pay a lot of money for it. Product security must go through technical protective measures to prevent counterfeit. These measures include counterfeit-proof labeling, provision of transport tracking, protection of technical information about the product, and security to ensure that the product cannot be copied.
If a product only has one form of identity, physically or technically, it will be vulnerable to reproduction and counterfeit fraud. Whereas, products with multiple features will ensure that product protection is increased and reproduction is less likely or successful. Brands that want to ensure complete protection of their companies and products must ensure to instill product protection into their business. Although brand protection is useful, it is not enough. Allowing companies to produce counterfeit products before taking action means that damage has already been done to your business. This could hinder its trust and authenticity.
Keeping a brand’s products protected is crucial. Without protection, a business can lose customers, hinder its reputation, and lose the trust of partners. Thus, every brand needs solutions and strategies to produce branded products. Some examples and useful strategies to help protect branded products include:
Register your property: registering your intellectual property is crucial as a business. If your brand is registered formally, very little can be counterfeited or copied. When you register your business, you will be given a company trademark, which means nobody is allowed to copy your product or ideas. However, registering your business is only the first step towards protection. A trademark in fact would protect you by law and on paper only, leaving you exposed to outlaws.
Be active online: being active online, especially on social media, will ensure that you can be authentic. Brand authenticity will increase brand awareness, reputation, and attract loyal customers. Most counterfeiting frauds happen online. Thus, if you are on top of your game and have loyal customers, you will be able to detect a fraud account sooner rather than later.
Build customer awareness: On a similar note, when you build customer awareness, they will be aware of what products are real or counterfeit. When a client recognizes a fraud product, they will be able to report it and protect your branded products sooner. Educating your loyal customers on your legitimate products and trademarks will ensure that they always seek out real and trustworthy branded products.
Signing non-disclosure agreements with brand partners: non-disclosure agreements will need to be signed between your business and its partners so that nobody can mimic or copy your products. If you allow partners to access your ideas without an agreement, you may be putting your branded products at risk.
Adopting these measures for your business will ensure that brand product protection is increased, but this doesn’t mean that counterfeiting will be less likely to occur to you.
Counterfeiting can occur to any business in the market from any industry, starting from fashion goods to healthcare. When a branded product is copied, it can affect a business’s revenue and may also cause harm to the customer.
For instance, the refilling issue involves fraudsters filling authentic branded bottles with products that are not legitimate and might not be safe. This includes medicines, alcohol, beauty products, printer cartridges, and more. If you purchase a counterfeited product and use it, the ingredients may not be safe and can hinder your health.
Always checking that a product you are purchasing is from a verified seller, or the brand themselves, will increase safety and authenticity of the branded product.
Alongside protection strategies to safeguard your brand and its products, there are some other simple ways to help secure products.
Blockchain verification. Working with a product authenticity company that uses blockchain will ensure that your product information, authentication, and ownership details are secured, unforgeable and accessible for customers. This will increase their trust and ensure that your business sales and customer base are maintained.
NFC product tags. Adding NFC product tags to your branded products will protect them from counterfeit or refilling. Customers can purchase your products knowing that they are authentic.
Trademarking. Ensuring that your branded product has one or many trademarks logos or features will decrease the risk of being counterfeited.
Lastly, you will want to know about product tracking solutions and how they can guarantee security. When you work with an established anti-counterfeiting company, they will ensure that your branded product is tracked from start to finish. By doing so, security is guaranteed across the entire product value chain.
All products from all markets should be able to be traced to ensure authenticity and reduce the risk of them being tampered with by counterfeit and refilling fraudsters. Ensuring that your branded products are registered, traceable, tagged, and easy to distinguish will protect them and maintain trust and sales from your customers.
Authena is a leading provider of block chain-based technology solutions for tracking supply chains and guaranteeing product authenticity. Through our end-to-end technology framework, we support our customers in fighting product counterfeiting, parallel imports, and detour of pharmaceutical, industrial, agrochemical, food and personal care products worldwide. Our cost-effective solutions prevent losses for many companies around the world. Using serialized QR code tags, which act as a digital seal, manufacturers can guarantee the authenticity and the integrity of their goods and detect unauthorized interactions with them in real time. Finally, with a powerful management platform, brands can monitor product distribution and use.