marketing ethics

The Counterfeiters

Brand Dilemma

If anyone thinks that there are no smart people outside of the corporations who can beat them at their own game, then they need to rethink. Brand protection has become the big problem for corporations. The challengers are smarter and faster, they counterfeit brands, fill their packs with their own stuff, which are often spurious, and make big money. The fake industry in India is estimated to constitute about 35 per cent of the branded products sold.

      The brand problems are compounded when, in the world designs, it becomes unmanageable to remain unscathed from copycats. Fashion designers, gems, and jewellery firms, fashion accessories such as wrist watches, sun glasses, etc. Find their designs reproduced and sold as genuinely fake. Consumers who cannot afford high end branded products do not mind flaunting fakes. Somehow people do love to rise their status symbol, albeit with a fake brand, and gain some social equality with the rich and famous, the fake designer market appears to be even higher than that of the counterfeited brands.

        Consumer in Iraq love Unilever products marked ‘Made in France and it closed its last production unit in France a good ten years ago. To its greater disappointment, in India, where it is a market leader in fast moving consumer goods (FMCG’S), it has been establishing that there are over a hundred imitations of their product Fair & Lovely alone. Some of the other more affected brands are Vicks, Axe, Ariel, Parachute, Johnson & Johnson, Clinic plus, Dove, Lux, Colgate, and Pears. It has been reported that of the total market share of Rs. 1,13,000 crores in FMCG’s, the revenue loss due to intimations is Rs. 5000 crores. Up to 30 percent of the packaged toiletries have been reported to be counterfeits.

   The economic and social repercussions of counterfeiting the brands are enormous in terms of employment to the people, revenue loss to the companies, and tax loss to the country, the social cost of potential damage to health is enormous.