Keeping one step ahead of the criminals

15 November 2011



Andrew Gilbert, business development director, Ingenia Technology, provides an insight on the trends he is seeing in brand protection and anti-counterfeiting


Counterfeiters continue to become ever more organised, professional and sophisticated. Packaging is their first point of call, often producing near perfect copies of containers and boxes that even the genuine producers find difficult to tell apart from their own. Counterfeiters have no marketing or legal distribution costs and often pay very low direct overheads, so are able to invest disproportionately in producing high quality packaging that uses similar techniques and materials to genuine products. The packaging is often far better than the counterfeit product inside, as it is the packaging that needs to fool the consumer into paying for the item.

Increasingly, the improvement in the quality of counterfeit packaging is resulting in more counterfeit products being sold unknowingly by genuine retailers.

Clearly, the packaging that a product comes in is crucial – whether you are trying to ensure the products are genuine or you are trying to copy them. For genuine suppliers and brand managers the drive is to include features on the packaging that make copying difficult or, ideally, impossible and ensure that only their authentic products reach consumers.

Working with partners, such as Cartondruck, in the luxury goods and cosmetics industries, gives us insight into the real challenges that leading companies within the markets face when protecting their brands and packaging.

The brand power of these large industry names has been built up over many years, with a reputation for quality to protect. It is always necessary to strike a balance between protecting the products and decreasing the risk that counterfeiters will produce copies, without adversely affecting the aesthetics and branding of the carton.

As a result, packaging providers continue to turn to security technology companies to supply them with sophisticated solutions to these problems, and understand the importance of working with partners that they trust. In turn, this provides them with the latest technology and allows them to keep one step ahead of counterfeiters and pass that confidence on to their customers.

There is a range of anti-counterfeiting measures available that brands can currently deploy. These can either be overt measures such as barcodes, holograms or colour-shifting inks, or covert techniques such as using special chemicals, taggants or watermarks. Unfortunately, history has shown that the counterfeiters are smart and motivated; if a method exists to produce a security feature, then the counterfeiters can replicate it.

Consequently, a multi-layered approach is always required – no one solution will ever be enough to defeat the counterfeiters. The majority of today’s anti-counterfeit technologies rely upon adding physical features to an item or product that are secure only because the genuine manufacturer can do something that the counterfeiter cannot. Whether it is because the technique is too difficult or requires massive capital investment (holograms), the materials are hard to obtain (colour-shifting inks and taggants) or the information is secret (encrypted barcodes) the security feature is valuable only as long as the counterfeiter’s knowledge and resources do not equal those of the legitimate source.

Brand owners and packaging producers can also work together to add codes to the packaging. But these can be ‘found’ by the counterfeiters and replicated, passed-off (a similar-looking technology is added), or ignored and never checked.

As a result, the need for truly covert coding of individual items, to allow for reliable and robust authentication and tracing, is an area where new technologies will be utilised more to assist brand owners and protect consumers. Manufacturers need to find ways to secure their packaging so there is nothing to replicate, copy or remove and they are always able to verify whether a package is genuine and also distinguish its individual identity.

As technology plays an ever-increasing part in packaging production, from design, printing and processing to distribution, it will also play more of a role in paving the way for anti-counterfeiting and antidiversion solutions for manufacturers and brand owners.

Of course, although new techniques will continue to be added to the armoury of anti-counterfeiting, it is important to remember, given the resources of counterfeiters, that deploying any one technique as a standalone anti-counterfeiting measure will always provide a weak level of security. Organisations must find a way to fully integrate more covert security solutions into packaging, to ensure consistency and accountability at all times while keeping one step ahead of the criminals. No easy feat, but with the evolution of security solutions available we are now better equipped than ever.

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and may not be shared by this publication.


Andrew Gilbert Andrew

Andrew Andrew


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