Brand Protection – For brands, counterfeiting poses a business, legal, and ethical issue. While counterfeit products make the brand less competitive in the market, they also open room for uninvited lawsuits from customers, organizations, and government agencies. At the same time, it raises an ethical question; are you, as a brand, doing enough to prevent counterfeiting of your products? It is not a healthy situation when it is easier to grab counterfeits of your product than the actual product – you are creating an environment of distrust for your customers.
Traditional Anti-counterfeiting Methods
A major reason smaller brands hold back in the fight against counterfeits is cost. With most industries where counterfeiting is prominent, there is usually hyper competition: fashion, makeup, watches, and food. With these sectors, the margins are already low, and to stay relevant, brands spend millions on marketing and R&D with little left for anything else.
Traditional anti-counterfeit methods are costly and require continual human intervention. Telling genuine products from counterfeit ones is not an easy job even for the brands themselves. Even with the high cost, manual sorting is a lengthy process and may take days for even a medium-sized inventory.
Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) systems such as QR codes, barcodes, RFID, and holograms make way for inexpensive anti-counterfeit technologies, but they are inefficient. Let us see how each of them works and why they are inefficient in preventing and identifying your brand’s counterfeits.
Radio Frequency Identification
Radio Frequency Identification technology requires RFID readers and tags to work.
A brand can put tags with unique IDs in their products, which distributers can validate against a known database of valid IDs. An invalid tag will make the distributer discard the item and raise a red flag with the brand to investigate.
While RFID is a popular AIDC technology used by inventory management systems to identify and sort pallets and individual items in a warehouse, it is not very efficient at identifying and preventing the counterfeiting of your brand.
A counterfeiter can easily replicate your RFID tags to deceive your distributors and retailers. In addition, no customer walks into a store with an RFID reader – RFID is not a consumer-friendly technology.
QR Codes
QR codes are gaining prominence as a method of contactless payment because, unlike RFID tags, they do not require dedicated readers. Therefore, anybody with a smartphone can read the information in a QR code. It could be to make a payment or check whether the item they are buying is genuine or not.
While QR code is a more consumer-friendly technology than RFID, the two share the same limitation: anybody can mimic your QR codes to deceive your customers, distributer, and retailers.
Barcodes
Barcodes allow retailers to process thousands of items in a day and improve the speed of billing. Adding anti-counterfeiting procedures to barcodes will reduce the speed of billing and will be disliked by the customers. Moreover, like QR codes, barcodes are very replicable.
Holograms
Holograms address one of the main limitations with QR codes and RFID tags: they are not as easy to replicate. Holograms are printed with proprietary technology and specialized methods and thus are difficult to replicate for a counterfeiter. However, due to their specialized printing methods, they are, unlike QR codes and RFID tags, an expensive method to prevent counterfeiting for small and medium sized enterprises especially.
You may print QR codes on any piece of paper. However, that does not go for holograms. They need special surfaces and even hardware to be produced.
Irreplicable, Inexpensive, and Efficient Anti-counterfeit Technology
The existing technologies that brands employ for anti-counterfeit measures are neither efficient nor affordable. Rising customer awareness means buyers want to test the authenticity of the products they are purchasing. They are more likely to choose a brand that actively markets its anti-counterfeit labels on their products and encourage its customers to test them as well.
Brands, whether developing their own technology or licensing one, tend to run into cost issues and the resulting anti-counterfeit methods are not very practical for customers and retailers. Most proprietary anti-counterfeit technologies available in the market require customers to download a mobile app, they are then expected to scan a code and authenticate the genuineness of a product.
What brands need is an anti-counterfeit technology that is customer-centric, easy to implement, and cost-effective. Fortunately, Cypheme offers the most effective, efficient and inexpensive, and customer-centric anti-counterfeit technology in the market.
How Cypheme Anti-counterfeit Technology Works?
Cypheme’s AI-based anti-counterfeit technology runs on an artificial neural network. It provides participating brands with inimitable labels they can integrate with their packing. Customers can scan these immutable labels to tell a genuine product from a counterfeit one in less than 5 seconds.
In addition, Cypheme’s anti-counterfeit AI tech allows manufacturers to geo-fence areas where the counterfeiting of their products is widespread and, eventually, pinpoint the location of the counterfeiter.
Despite its technological advancements, Cypheme’s solutions are easier to implement and built with your customers in mind. Your customers can scan these labels with any standard smartphone and they are not required to download any application.
The best part is Cypheme’s much advanced AI powered anti-counterfeit technology does not come at a high cost. Cypheme gives partner brands competitive price points with the intention of not driving their prices higher or making them less competitive.
Anybody with a smartphone can detect the authenticity of a product, and that goes for manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers and the end-users as well.
Cypheme is a preventive anti-counterfeit technology; That is, customers can check the authenticity of a product before they make a purchasing decision. This spares the brands the embarrassment of selling counterfeit products and gives greater confidence to consumers towards your products.
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