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The Era of Counterfeit Products

Counterfeits, Replicas, illegal and Pirated products are all over and in all industries be it Food, Beverage, Life Science, Tobacco, Security, Automotive, Packaging, Pharmaceuticals, etc. The real threat of counterfeit products is equal to low-quality products. Whilst this might not appear like a serious threat (and for those who intentionally buy phony for an outermost reason, it’s not), the veracity is that below-par quality items can have real, terrible outcomes.

Unavoidably, these outcomes have a serious negative impact on a brand’s reputation and, successively, consumer trust. In most cases, the consumer is not able to pick out between a genuine product and a counterfeit, and when the item fails to work correctly, breaks down, or overall doesn’t meet their expectations, the customer will blame the legitimate company. This results in the customer losing trust in the brand and also likely means that they won’t purchase the same product of the same brand in the future.

Way back to 2020 when the pandemic began, the demand for essential products raised, and more consumers turned to e-commerce to buy their medical, daily needs, pharmaceutical products. Woefully, this increased the generality of counterfeit. A recent study found a dramatic increase in fake pharmaceuticals and medicines, adding to an illicit industry already estimated to be worth more than 4 billion euros (globalinitiative.net).

Are you also skeptical regarding the genuineness of your product?

If not then it is high time because trade in counterfeit and sham products has risen immovably in the last few years, in fact, altogether trade volumes stagnated and now abide at 3.3% of global trade, according to a new report by the OECD and the EU’s Intellectual Property Office.

Even yearly sales losses from counterfeiting in the pharmaceutical sector amounted to 10.2 billion euros. This figure was 26.3 billion euros for clothing products, the highest (statista.com).

How we can fight off counterfeiting

As a consumer, we have a very important role to play in illicit trade so it is important to empower ourselves by educating about the rights. In order to put up a real fight against counterfeit products, it is critical for us to identify a genuine product from a fake one before buying it.

The printing and Packaging industry already started using track & trace technology to combat counterfeiting which assists brand owners to track their products at all times. Due to its increasing popularity with brand owners, it’s logical that this is a technology, potential label converters will have to invest in sooner or later.

Today many brand owners of the supply chain industry, packaging and labeling industry, pharmaceuticals industry, automotive industry, luxury goods, are using track & trace technology to protect their products and documents. It authorizes them to trace the authentic products throughout the supply chain – from design to distribution and point of sale – composing it easy to check whether or not the right product is at the right place at the right time.

What is Track and Trace?

Well, if will talk about track and trace in the supply chain industry so, it refers to the capability to recognize the past and present position of all product inventory, as well as a history of product guardianship. In industries, the wide implementation of track and trace technology is going to be the next rational step in the age of the consumer-led supply chain.

The ultimate challenge for today’s supply chain in track and trace is due to the limited granularity of data, outdated paper processes, lack of actionable data insights, disjointed data systems that slow down communication. The insufficiency of data affinity reveals supply chains to problems like compliance violation, counterfeiting, manual errors, visibility gaps, inaccurate demand and supply predictions.

 Track and Trace with Blockchain

As we know, global investment in blockchain solutions will hit $11.7 billion by 2022, and the worldwide blockchain technology market is estimated to rack up $20 billion in revenue by 2024.

So, with blockchain technology, supply chain companies intensify the capability to speedily pinpoint potential sources of harm to efficiently prevent and rectify outbreaks.

Apart from this with Blockchain technology, track and trace applications can also build on which numerous parties can manage directly via a peer-to-peer grid, without the need for central supremacy to verify transactions as there is not going to be a single grid owner.

Finally, brands need to take the initiative and try as much as possible to educate the consumers on how they can identify real products and fake ones. It is important to highlight what they stand to gain by using the genuine ones and why they should steer away from the fake ones.

Many companies across the globe tried to face the problems of counterfeiting alone when the damage caused by counterfeiting became obvious. What they each found is that the conventional approach is futile. Universal counterfeiting employed across the internet is a contemporary problem and a contemporary brand protection solution is requisite to battle the counterfeit industry.

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