Roland Meylan, corporate communications manager, AlpVision talks to IDL about the challenges of protecting brands and discusses how to combat counterfeiting.

IDL: What are the main challenges for brand owners today?

RM: Customer care, brand awareness and brand loyalty are the three key issues for brands to keep or attract more satisfied consumers. Anti-counterfeiting programmes can be seen as part of these challenges, namely to ensure that a consumer of a branded product has a genuine product in their hands, wherever it was purchased, including online.

IDL: What is the key to addressing the growing problem of counterfeiting?

RM: Counterfeiting erodes brand image and may damage brand loyalty, not to mention the direct financial losses it causes. But it is difficult to estimate these losses. If we assume that fake products are of a lower quality or even dangerous for consumers’ health – in particular, medicines, health and body care products, as well as toys, automotive spare parts, electrical home appliances and so on – counterfeiting can cause serious damage which may even lead to legal action. The cost of halting counterfeiting and obtaining compensation can be high.

Consequently, developing a comprehensive and rigorous anti-counterfeiting programme is a challenge. However, it will help:

·         Better measurement of the extent of the problem and its impact on the brand worldwide,

·         Enable a quick response by the manufacturer, the supply and distribution chain the courts, the police, customs and consumers;

·         Drive counterfeiters to alternative products and brands which are not protected by a serious anti-counterfeiting programme;

·         Educate the whole supply chain to combat counterfeiting

·         Increase revenue if fake products are early uncovered and replaced by genuine ones.

We could perhaps even say that using an anti-counterfeiting programme which also addresses the needs of the consumer and online commerce could provide a significant opportunity for branded product manufacturers to develop brand awareness and loyalty compared with those brands which are not so active in combating counterfeiting.

IDL: People often use the terms product identification and product authentication interchangeably, but this can be confusing for brand owners. What are your views on their meaning?

RM: There is a clear and fundamental difference between identification and authentication. The first provides information on the product to the supply chain: manufacturing origin and related information such as instructions for use, distribution (pricing) and stock details and so on. But this does not indicate if the product is genuine or fake, because fraudsters will also replicate the identification marks, such as a barcode or a serial number.

Authentication allows a genuine product to be distinguished from a fake. High security level authentication solutions are mostly covert so as not to open the door to attacks. The best known example, which combines both identification and authentication features, is the banknote on which you can see an individual serial number for identification, together with secret security features to enable clear genuine or fake authentications by professionals or using specialist scanners.

IDL: Are some solutions better for authentication than identification and vice versa?

RM: Identification should be easy to read, either with the naked eye or with a standard machine, such as a bar code scanner. Anyone can see this information, which gives details of the product or its localisation. But authentication based on covert features will make the job of fraudsters much more difficult, especially if the components (security consumable and detection device) of the covert authentication solution are difficult to obtain or if the authentication process is kept secret. Here, again, the banknote is a good example.