ADDRESSING FAKE INTERNALLY

• Building an Internal Anti- Counterfeit Team

  The prime responsibility for handling counterfeiting will rest most of the time with in- house counsel along with Compliance and Regulatory department and will involve representatives from different corporate functions, as well as outside consultants and legal counsel. A typical team should include Marketing and Sales Head, Ethics and Compliance officer, Legal Counsel, Supply Chain Head, Research and Development head, Public Relation officer and Corporate Communication team along with External Law firm and investigation firm/officials. Any company whose products are at risk of counterfeiting should have proper policies and procedures in place to manage this threat. Counterfeiting becomes easy to address and tackle when company sets up a cross-functional task force to address the issue in a coordinated, holistic manner, recommended participants — will vary by industry and enterprise, but will normally include legal, marketing, risk management, loss prevention departments as a general practice.

• Control Supply Chain

  The supply chain is one of the most important areas that brands need to invest in to eliminate counterfeiting and to protect their brand image. Counterfeiters success depends on the ability to make their products appear as authentic as possible and this achieved by obtaining or copying legitimate packaging cartons, and ingredients that make the counterfeits difficult, if not impossible, to visually distinguish from the real thing. By ensuring transparency and legitimacy of the supply chain from the beginning to end, manufacturers and retailers can eliminate some, if not all counterfeitrelated risks and the best way to address counterfeiting issues is to focus on improving the supply chain quality control, from manufacturing to final mile delivery. An experienced supply chain partner will be able to ensure transparency, authentication and greatly increased quality assurance measures. Companies must closely inspect their supply chains for any vulnerability to ensure that their vendors do not deal with counterfeiters. Companies should ensure their agreements contain anti counterfeit agreements and should conduct unannounced random audits. When it comes to preventing counterfeiting for both online and offline distribution channels, quality assurance and careful monitoring need to be part of your supply chain strategy.

• Monitor Distribution Chain and Points of Promotion

  As products move through the manufacturing and distribution process, numerous channels are involved – each presenting an opportunity for illegitimate / counterfeit product to enter the supply chain and find its way to consumers by using same effective promotion techniques and channels employed by legitimate marketers/manufacturers. Hence A management process that allows a brand owner to plan, detect, respond to, and recover from security incidents is critical for a safe and secure supply chain. Accordingly, companies must institute procedures for authenticating and monitoring the entities that distribute and sell their products. They must be sure to select reputable distributors and retailers and should enter into contractual relationships with these entities that demand that the products be shipped in original and unaltered form. It is important to note that some sales of counterfeit products which are sold to the Ultimate customer may not be preventable by the brand owner, since they may enter through an illegitimate supply chain. Therefore, a process must be in place for detecting, reporting, and investigating potential counterfeit product sold through both the legitimate and the illegitimate supply chains.

• Invest in Anti-Counterfeit Technology

  QR and RFID schemes can use block chain technology to prevent fraud and counterfeiting. In order to improve product safety the features should be easily read by various target groups using tools easily available, and should have tamper evident or void evident effect and should be such that the manufactures could incorporate the solution into their production processes easily while being non-disruptive to a manufacturer’s existing production process while should have the ability to provide unique identity code for each product could create a vast amount of business intelligence for the company.

• Update Your Model Fast along with Packaging

  In order to formulate an effective ant counterfeiting strategy, protect products and customers from the risks of counterfeiting and protect brand value, every company should use techniques which make it difficult to counterfeit its products; and enable its products to be distinguished from counterfeit products. It takes counterfeiters a month to reverse engineer a genuine product and bring it to market. Use of overt features in packaging such as the shape, style and size of the packaging can enable a company to teach customers/clients/consumers how to distinguish its products from fake/knock outs and use of Covert features can enable a company to detect counterfeit products as the purpose of a covert feature is to enable only the brand owner to identify counterfeited product. The public will not be aware of its presence nor have the means to verify it. A covert feature is not easy to detect or copy. If compromised or publicized, most covert features will lose some if not all of their security value. They are technology and vendor specific and require special reading and scanning devices. Labels and packaging materials should be designed to maximize the difficulty of copying in terms of both resemblance to the original and the cost of copying, as this can help to prevent or detect counterfeit products, If manufacturing and supply chain allow fast model updates and if this is in line with overall strategy, by all means use this tactic to counter counterfeit products.

• Enforcement and Detection (investigate any unpretentious leads fully)

• There is no set formula to detect counterfeiters as there are too many variables, hence investigating leads in a thorough and sophisticated manner is an essential component of combating a counterfeiting problem. Companies faced with threatened or actual counterfeiting problems should employ seasoned investigators who would carry out random checks if the problem becomes acute, would draw up a a proper strategy for investigation and enforcement and raids should be conducted at identified targets and move up the chain in order to go after the “big fish” in the operations. Identify the major offenders, offering the maximum number of counterfeit goods in the most highly trafficked places, and address them first. Brand owners should conclude which counterfeit goods are producing the largest sales, and aim them first as well. Such investigations serve as crucial building blocks for civil litigation or criminal prosecutions that may be pursued in the future.

• Establish Excellent Government Relations

  Establishing long-term partnerships with governmental agencies, generating awareness and Interactions with the law enforcement authorities to emphasize on the importance of continued awareness and seriousness of the impact of counterfeit goods and interaction with state level policy makers is another essential way to combat counterfeiting.

• Take proactive action and Prepare to Litigate Aggressively

  Counterfeiters obviously encounter more success when left to operate unchallenged; they’re also known to shift their energies to more passive targets when brands visibly fight back. Pursuing litigation against those that manufacture, distribute, and sell counterfeit goods can have a huge deterrent effect. Such action demonstrates a company’s commitment to combating counterfeiting activity, and often will cause counterfeiters to look elsewhere.

• Educate your customer and Involve the Brand Protection Community

  Your customers can be an important collaborator in minimizing sales of counterfeit goods with all its associated costs. Educate your customers about the risks of buying from unlicensed sources, and recruit them to join in the effort by reporting suspicious goods and sellers while building brand loyalty. Collaborate with trading partners, peers, competitors, suppliers and law enforcement. Participate in industry organizations, conferences and these communities can be a resource for information on how to protect your brand from counterfeit activities.

• Social Media

  Register your brand names and trademarks with social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter as this helps in blocking others from using intellectual property rights on social media sites. Deter cybersquatting by purchasing domain names that include IPR terms or terms that would likely be confusingly similar. Post, market, advertise actively on various social networking sites to promote genuine brands and improve customer awareness and deter potential infringement while continuously monitoring bad press, intellectual property infringement, and the sale of counterfeit goods. Invest in Online intelligence as it can help identify the most outstandingly bad infringers, so that offline defensive efforts can be focused where they’ll be most cost effective and operationally deliver best results for the efforts invested in anticounterfeit activity. Imitators and impostors use the same effective promotion techniques engaged by genuine marketers while leveraging the powerful, highly identifiable brands built by specialists and hence monitoring for these promotional efforts is critical — and enables our next best practice.