Is 'dupe' a dirty word?

Last week Michael Miraflor, the chief brand officer at venture fund Hannah Grey, posted on LinkedIn about a body wash that was advertising itself on Instagram as a ‘dupe’ of a designer brand.

We tend to be pretty diligent at keeping up with ad trends, but this was the first time that we’d seen a brand use that word to describe one of its own products, and it got us thinking – first of all, about what exactly constitutes a 'dupe'.

According to The Cut, which has run a series of articles this year under the heading ‘peak dupe’, the word was born of the beauty sector in the early 2000s, when it was used to describe substitutes for sold-out or discontinued MAC makeup products.

But the economics of the internet mean that words with SEO value tend to take on expansive definitions, and as dupe spotting has become a popular angle for content creators, the term has spread to other product categories and been used to describe both own-brand alternatives and actual counterfeits.

To some extent the semantics don't matter, since there's data that seems to support the growth of the trend under either definition.

The European Union Intellectual Property Office reported in 2022 that 37% of 15-to 24-year-olds had bought a fake product on purpose in the past 12 months, up from 14% in 2019.

And the UK CEO of budget supermarket Aldi, Giles Hurley, this week told the BBC that ‘own-label products are growing at twice the rate of branded goods’ in terms of volume sales amid the cost-of-living crisis.

What's most interesting is that for a significant chunk of shoppers (younger ones, especially), the term 'dupe' has none of the negative connotations of a word like 'knock-off'. Such is the lack of stigma around the word that even Whole Foods Market was comfortable using it to promote its own-brand products in a TikTok video in January.

But Aldi's Hurley probably went a too far when he said that shoppers’ mindsets with regards own-label products had changed for good, remarking, ‘Why would [they] go back?’

If there’s one lesson that marketers should have learned from the pandemic it’s that there is no guarantee that behaviours and attitudes adopted as a response to a crisis will endure after the crisis has abated.

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