As the holiday season approaches, arm yourself with 3 of the most effective brand protection solutions for your business.
There is no other season in the year like the holidays. It’s the season of giving, shopping, and celebrations. In the past, brick-and-mortar shops would be evident to crowds of shoppers, buying gifts for the people in their lives. But 2020 redefined our shopping experience on a global scale, and here we are, about to approach another high-traffic, online shopping holiday season this 2021.
Most holiday shopping this year will still be occurring via online marketplaces and e-commerce stores. There are many pros to this shift towards e-commerce, but businesses worldwide are likewise subjected to various brand threats as the internet becomes the most powerful enabler of counterfeit trade.
Brand owners spend a significant amount of time, money, and effort building their brands and ensuring top-quality products to be made, especially for the long-established ones. They’ve earned a respectable brand reputation, which ultimately makes consumers choose them over the others. But with cheaper, lookalike imitations that are easily available to be purchased online, original brands are now at the mercy of counterfeits and fake products, losing a ton of sales and profits through various forms of infringement.
Counterfeits may be cheaper, but they are rarely at par in quality and value. The price difference may be often based on whether the product has successfully passed quality standards or not.
Why Brand Protection Solutions for your Packaging Matters in Your Product’s Security
Any product that you buy from a store comes with its unique packaging. A packaging serves different purposes:
- to provide protection & ensure the product reaches the consumer in good condition,
- to carry relevant information about the product, which may include directions for safety and proper use,
- to enhance a product’s aesthetics, and
- to promote the business and communicate the brand.
These are a few of the most common uses of product packaging. But with the imminent threat that counterfeits pose to brands, brand protection strategies have also become invaluable for businesses to actively fight back against counterfeit trade.
Brand Protection Solutions for Businesses this Holiday Season
Brand protection is the act of integrating anti-counterfeiting solutions, anti-theft, and tamper-evident solutions on product packaging to help minimize the potential damages that threaten a brand. An authentic brand’s value could be attacked and damaged by activities like counterfeiting, piracy, product theft, and tampering.
With e-commerce generally making it so much easier for these transactions to occur with minimal to no sense of accountability, brand protection solutions have become a necessity alongside any business’ efforts to build their brand identity and brand awareness.
1. Consumer Education
Clear communication paves the way for understanding what is truly going on. Not all consumers are aware of the presence, what more of the proliferation of counterfeits in their midst. They may become drawn to purchasing knock-offs for the cheaper price and savings they get.
Brand owners are responsible for educating consumers about the quality of their products, the presence of fake imitations, incorporating brand protection solutions that will distinguish their brands from all the rest, and then communicating these authenticity measures for the consumer’s assurance in their packaging.
If you’re a cosmetics brand, communicate the safety of your products’ composition and the potential dangers of purchasing cheaper versions that do not meet the same standards and may contain ingredients that harm the consumers’ face or skin. Guide the consumers on how they can be assured to purchase authentic cosmetic products. And then make it easier for the public to distinguish a counterfeit product from an original one by integrating brand-protection strategies.
Electronic gadgets and automotive parts are among the most-targeted industries for counterfeits. Electronics are a huge tool for convenience in our modern lives, but they could be easily duplicated without meeting any standards and sold for a cheaper price. The lack of testing and meeting standard quality measures could pose threats to people’s lives when these electronics and automotive parts are used. Brands need to initiate this information drive and campaign against cheaper knock-offs.
2. Security Packaging
Brand owners are in a better position to fight back against counterfeits when they mindfully integrate brand-protection strategies in their product packaging. For industries that are plagued with grey market sales and counterfeits such as the pharmaceutical industry, retail, automotive industry, and even the government, product packaging should also serve the purpose of informing consumers about the safety and security of the products involved. Integrating measures to authenticate products would set brand owners apart and make it harder for unauthorized companies/sellers from duplicating and selling cheaper knock-offs on the internet.
There are several ways to integrate security packaging. Secure packaging does not have to mean losing the aesthetic presentation of one’s product, which a lot of retail brands are concerned with, understandably. Packtica offers a wide range of customizable, security labels that are designed to fit the unique requirements of every brand. By integrating variable data printing technologies in the form of QR codes, micro texts, and mosaic designs, to name a few, each security packaging is executed uniquely and comes with one-of-a-kind features.
By delivering the highest quality of security available for every packaging design, we ensure to prevent or minimize infringement through product theft or product imitation. We offer user-friendly and convenient product verification modes that do not require special equipment; smartphones are enough. And we do all these with the help of variable data printing technologies or hidden information that carries authentication data to detect or prevent product tampering.
Packtica’s SecurePack combines a variety of security printing technologies e.g. hologram foil hot stamping, variable data, transparent hologram lamination, and special ink for identification and bespoke pattern purposes. SecurePack, which was introduced in 2017, is differentiated by the use of variable data which provides an added layer of protection for products and brands.
3. Product Authentication
As counterfeit transactions mostly happen online, having a reliable online authentication process in place will save a lot of time and keep counterfeits at bay or minimize them. Packtica’s CheckNow is an online QR code authentication platform that has effectively prevented a lot of counterfeit activities. Today, CheckNow has evolved into a multi-use platform that’s capable of more than simply conducting authentication procedures, but also marketing, communication, and big data collection.
Through CheckNow’s revolutionary technology that utilizes big data analytics, we’re able to retrieve and identify real-time information with high accuracy, thereby assisting businesses in examining complex but useful data that can inform their business decisions. By scanning a unique QR code on their smartphones, consumers get linked to our cloud-based server, where the authentication process occurs. CheckNow creates a two-way communication process between the consumers and platform users/subscribers.
With the holiday season on the horizon, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Let’s go beyond promoting our brand, but ensure to protect it too against various forms of infringement, especially counterfeits that are growing in number on various online platforms.
Protect your brand through one of the biggest online authentication platform providers in SEA. At Packtica, we enable you to fight back against brand attacks in a variety of ways.
Contact us directly at +632-8842-0430 or email sales@packtica.com.ph to choose the best brand protection solutions that suit your business needs this holiday season!
